We started our drive today, to start a week+ long car trip with Evelyn’s sisters’ family.  First stop: Death Valley. Since we plan on getting some (hopefully) nice photographs along the way, we wanted to start out with arriving in the desert in time for a sunset shot.  Sunset in Death Valley is awfully early this time of year, with the Ephemerus telling us it will come at 4:48PM.  Hmmm…  A 9 hour drive means we need to start at 6AM, and go the ‘fast’ route down Highway 5, instead of the more scenic route over Lake Tahoe and down the Eastern side of the Sierras.

6AM?  Who am I kidding…?  After oversleeping and not getting on the road until 6:45, we thought we still had some time to spare, but would have to go straight to the lookout point we had identified in pre-trip research.

Have you ever driven Highway 5 between San Jose and Los Angeles?  If so, you know that it was built for speed and efficiency.  It looks like a Soviet era architect built it, with no concern for aesthetics, or anything not moving you forward as fast as possible.  This is good and bad – we did want to get there quickly, but at the cost of extreme boredom…

A little North of Bakersfield, we stopped at a sign that promised gas and food, hopefully not together.  Fueled up the car, and then went looking for a place to fuel up ourselves.  Passed by the Denny’s and Burger King’s of the strip, until we hit the end of the business section.  Last choices were a pizza join or a “fast food Mexican” place.  After mentally flipping a coin, we decided on the Mexican. 

Excellent choice it turned out.  We saw “wet burrito” on the menu.  Since we had never had that, we decided to try it.  Best Burrito In Town should have been on the restaurant masthead.  We loved it.  Of course, we were about an hour out of town before thinking we should maybe note down the name so we could stop there later if we come this way.  Seems our minds had been numbed by the drive too much to think.  All we remember was that it was on Olive Drive, off Highway 99, just North of Highway 50.  Some day we may stumble on it again…

Soon we found ourselves driving over the Tehachapi pass, with the wind farms.  Mostly the small, older turbines, but one monster turbine was on the hill, easily 10 times as large as any of the others.  This was probably the type we recently read about that will be replacing the older style.  More efficient, turn more slowly, needs fewer of them, so fewer birds killed.  We reminisced about flying over the pass in the 80’s in any of our four airplanes, when we would look down at the ants on the path, and realized we were now one of those ants as a plane flew overhead.

Turning north after the pass, we went through Red Rock Canyon.  It looked like it would probably be spectacular at sunrise, but the light was far too harsh now to make a good photograph, so we continued in our race to the desert.

30 miles out, we started seeing billboards for Gus’ “Really Good Jerky.”  Billboards continued for the duration, until we just had to stop and buy some.  Point 1: advertising apparently works.  Point 2:  It really was “really good jerky.” 🙂

As we entered the Death Valley park, we saw two things – there was an obnoxious cloud just over the mountain that the sun was going to set behind, and it was setting way too fast.  Turns out the 4:48PM assumed a flat horizon, but there are mountains surrounding the desert, so the sun really went down around 4:15, which means it lopped another half hour off our time.  As we arrived at Mesquite Flat Dunes, we saw that the cloud meant there was no real sunset illumination anyway, and sunset was a total bust.  Coulda slept in a bit more before leaving home…

Arrived at the hotel and checked in, only to discover that Internet connection would cost an additional $25 for a very slow connection.  Decided we could do without, and will instead post when we next find a decent connection.  Cell phone coverage is very spotty too, with only Edge connection on AT&T and 1-2 bars, so using the cell phone as a backup isn’t going to work. [Note: We are finally posting this on Dec 29 when in Sedona)

Met up with Pauline (Evelyn’s sister) and family, had dinner and hit the hay early after a very long day with nothing to show for it other than arriving at our first destination.  G’night all!

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If you get a good idea, it won’t work unless you work at it.