Day 14 – Death Valley
After leaving Las Vegas, not having become millionaires, regretfully, 馃榿 we stop at Carls’ Jr. for our 9th burger. This fast food chain must have been popular 50 years ago because there are only very old people inside (like in their 80’s or something).
We then head to the desert and see a “mini” tornado crossing the road just in front of us. Doo is thrilled, he’s always wanted to see one. We then go through a ghost town in the middle of nowhere. We stop there for a few moments. The place is really disconcerting. There’s an opera house displaying its daily activity even though everything seems abandoned.
After driving for a while, we finally reach Death Valley. The first landscapes are amazing. There are white mountains on the backdrop of black mountains. We then continue on towards a mini desert of salt, other steep valleys and, by the end of the afternoon, we reach a desert of fine sand. We did not imagine the landscapes would be so diverse here.
Tonight, we reach a tent reserved campsite but there’s hardly anyone here and it’s already too dark to go somewhere else, so we settle down. As we go to sleep, a beautiful full moon is rising just behind a mountain…
Day 15 – The American desert
This morning, we decide to return to the sand dunes. We take a garbage bag with us and head to the highest dune, a mile and a half away. To our grand surprise, it is not raining in the desert today… 馃槄
C么me and Doo take their shoes off to walk on the sand but they have no success in sliding down the dunes with the garbage bag. So we just enjoy the beautiful view and go back to the van. We have a long way to our next stop: the Sequoia National Park. That’s where the tallest trees in the world are. Doo is looking forward to it since Korea. That’s kind of the reason we took this road trip in the United States in the first place.
But it’s too far to get there tonight and we’ll actually stay most of the day in the desert. When comes lunch time, we stop in the middle of nowhere to eat and as we open the back door of the van to settle in, we hear some kind of deafening tear just above our heads. The latest generation fighter jet just flew at full speed over our heads. Like honestly, it must have passed less than a hundred meters from us. In barely 5 seconds, it has already reached the mountains in the difference (it will take us 2 hours to reach them). We then settle in the van, super excited to have had this experience (yes, we really lived it as an experience) and then, a second fighter jet flies right on top of us at the same speed. Doo tries to take a picture, but when he does, the plane is already far far away…
We then resume our journey through the desert. C么me and Julia play cards. Julia reads Harry Potter to C么me. We’ve started in Korea and we’re already reading the third book. C么me has become a huge fan. A few hours in, we drive by a vehicle cemetery (again in the middle of nowhere). We can’t believe it. What’s it doing here? We stop to take some pictures and talk to the owner of the place. That sort of thing can only be found in the US. But the “best” is yet to come. A few kilometers away, we pass through a city that is no ghost town but gives us goosebumps anyway. The school looks like a prison. There are high fences all around, lifeless walls and the playground is just a desert curl. In the residential neighborhood, there are abandoned objects everywhere and the dilapidated houses, some of which proudly display their rallying to Trump, blend perfectly into this desolate landscape. C么me is somehow terrified by this place and just wants to leave as soon as possible. As we go round the town one last time, we can’t help but wonder how people manage to live here.
The rest of the trip will be much more pleasant. We will drive through a magnificent green mountain chain with huge ranches scattered throughout and we’ll decide to camp in a beautiful forest in the middle of the mountains.
These past few days, C么me:
Did not understand: why it was called Death Valley when there are clearly lots of small plants growing.
Learnt: that one could see the mountains thinking that they are close when it turns out they are really far.
Loved: the car cemetery.
Julia:
Did not understand: why there were school buses abandoned in the wild.
Learnt: that there was a desert of salt in Death Valley.
Loved: the warmth of Death Valley.
Doo:
Did not understand: how one could live in the town of desolation.
Learnt: that Death Valley was very different from what he imagined.
Loved: the opera house in the middle of nowhere.
Burger counter: 09