California is truly a unique place, I can think of nowhere else where you can laze on golden beaches, ski on snow capped mountains or hike through scorching deserts all within the same month within the same state.
We have finally reached the final destination of our trip, which could well prove to be the most dangerous place we have visited to date, well for me anyway.
For some Las Vegas is a place of great hope, such as damn I hope we can win back some of the bloody money we have spent on this trip, but in reality it is more likely to be the place that will see me spend the rest of what I have and commit us all to a life of abject poverty.
So not wanting to dwell on the inevitable lets review the last few days in California......
We were all extremely sad to have to leave Lake Tahoe but Yosemite promised to be just as beautiful and it certainly didn’t let us down, we entered the national park from the north and there was snow everywhere.
Tyler spent no time at all in jumping out of the car and rolling around in it until his face was purple, his clothes were saturated and he could no longer feel the tips of his fingers, most other parents may have stepped in far earlier but he looked like he was having too much fun.
When we were finally satisfied that he wouldn’t lose his limbs we then proceeded to search for somewhere to lay our heads down for the night.
I vaguely remember my mate Dave mentioning that we should probably book our hotel immediately (when I spoke to him a few months ago) as it gets very busy, but as we didn’t know what day we would get there we thought we would risk it.
As it turns out this was a bit of an arror of judgement which saw us driving around various different roads at various levels of frustration for the next 5 hours hoping against hope that someone had got sick and cancelled their room.
We literally tried every hotel within a 40 mile radius until eventually we stumbled across what can only be described as a slightly run down version of the bates motel replete with its very own dead body smell on tap.
Pauline was someone confused when she noticed that you received a free hobo with every room but I quickly pointed out that in fact HBO was a TV network and I would have proved it to her too if our electrical equipment hadn’t been mutilated by the last lobotomised psycho to have frequented our room.
Luckily it was only for one night because having tried every single hotel in the area again the following morning we decided to cut our loses and head to Death Valley, we did have a chance to drive around and see a few of the sights though and they were absolutely spectacular.
Unfortunately at that precise moment our Sat Nav got it into its circuitry that we hadn’t done enough driving over the passed few days and as such decided to take us the longest way possible through some of the most uninteresting / unsanitary areas California has to offer.
This was how we found ourselves spending the night at the Motel 6 in Bakersfield surrounded by members of some territorial gang and their fateful canine companions, still that didn’t stop Tyler from attempting to mingle with them in the swimming pool totally unphased as always.
Fortunately we had far more luck securing accommodation at Death Valley as there was literally only one place to stay and it cost us an arm and a leg but it was very nice and I couldnt be arsed to drive the hour back out to another Motel 6 and potential turf wars.
You can sort of figure out how Death valley got its name as when we arrived the temperature was a roasty 48 degrees and apparently can get up to the 50's.
We visited a place called Badwater which is 282 feet below sea level and it apparently reached 58 degrees there in 1913, people literally watched as birds just fell out of the sky and died.
So with this in mind you can imagine my surprise that our hotel had a golf course and tennis courts that still seemed to be open, it was so hot that Paulines crocs started to melt walking to the hotel room.
Anyway that’s about it, in a few minutes I am off to pick my mum up from the airport, yipee someone else to talk to for a change!!
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