The Desert

I usually sleep very well when we are on these trips, but for some reason I hadn’t been.  But last night was really good.  Perhaps we are finally on the road.  (This is our fifth day away from home.)  Mt Whitney, if it is visible from Lone Pine, is one of these:

In Lone Pine we stayed at the Dow Villa and had breakfast at The Grill — shades of home.

As we descended into the desert, we saw a brownish haze.  Thinking it was LA smog blown into the valley, we turned on the car’s super-duper air filter.  Later, once we were out of the mountains, we could see that it was dust blown up from the dry land.

At lunch we talked about changing our route to avoid northern California on the return trip.  It would mean going home by way of Salt Lake City and Boise, which would be less direct but actually get us home a day earlier.  Finally we decided that the high winds and power outages would probably be over by the time we got to Sacramento.  And if not, we’ll just hole up somewhere that still has electrical service.

The desert has a beauty of its own, but it does go on and on.  After miles of no buildings, suddenly there was a clot of tall building clustered together, bumped up against the Nevada border.  I guess they were catering to the people who couldn’t wait any longer to lose their money at the gaming tables.  We kept our money in our purses but stopped to charge the car.

  Unfortunately the roller coaster by the charger wasn’t running.

I had planned the route to skirt Las Vegas to the south, but the car GPS wanted us to go to the next freeway north because of traffic on the original route.  And since we were going there, we decided to go a couple blocks off our route to stop at another charger — just to say we did.

We got to our motel in Henderson, Nevada about 4:30.  The place is showing its age.  The lobby is being reconstructed, and perhaps a few rooms.  I don’t know if we are the only guests, but we did find this in the lobby: