Sequestered in the Mojave

In which we provide the last update of the past three days, and I realise that internet access is going to be choppy from here on in.

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One thing I forgot to ask for when I bought a cheap, shitty phone was an alarm. And a display of it’s own number. All I said was “I want calls and texts”, when I really wanted an alarm as well. So now if I have to get up early, I have to draw myself fully awake as soon as I am capable, wake myself up to look at the time (on the phone or starting up the laptop) and then deciding from there. Of course, by doing this, I am now awake. This means that if I want to wake up at 8am, I will actually wake up at anywhere from 6:30 to 10:00. But I’m getting better at it…

Hey, they've heard of me!

So anyway, today at 7:15 I was getting up to get ready for a day of driving, Fresno to Tecopa. 6-7 hours driving. I didn’t want to spend the whole day driving without seeing anything, so I had to get onto the internet to do a bit of research (pamphlets in the hotel lobby were a bit meh). By 8:15 I was prepping the car for a day’s driving, GPS in hand and set to ‘find a library’. 8:30 saw me at the Fresno County Library… for talking books for the blind. 8:45 saw me at the Fresno County Library proper, waiting for it to open along with two dozen other people. 9:01 saw me quickly talking to a librarian to try and get a station before they all disappeared, 9:02 saw me get a guest card, 9:17 saw me kicked off the 15-minute timer, 9:20 saw me on the road and heading out of Fresno. Sequoia National Park was on the way but visiting it turned a 6 hour drive into an 8.5 hour drive. Well, may as well see it, and the route that google picks goes right through the park, NW to SW.

The route my GPS picked entered at the SW, unbeknownst to me.

So I got the map at the park entrance (thanks again for another $20 saved, Pommie boys) and eventually figured out the incorrect entrance. A few mental calculations and I could still make it into something interesting in the park in about an hour – another grove of giant sequoia redwoods – and back out on the same road and on my way. Hey, it’d be fun doing the mountain slalom driving on these good roads again.

Never got into Sequoia park proper

You know, I never met a German I didn’t like. Until now. So the limit on the road was 25mph. I was treating this somewhat organically (that means speeding by 5-10mph) and having a grand time driving for all of about 10 minutes. Then I caught up to the car of Germans. Not only did they drive at half the speed limit (10-15mph) but they also used none of the turnouts for slower vehicles so I could get by. About 20 minutes into the drive there was a scenic lookout which I stopped at and heard them getting in the car again. I looked at the map again. 40 more minutes of this. Doubled because they go at half speed. Decided I wasn’t having fun, I’d said hello to some gigantic redwoods yesterday, and promptly pulled the pin. Turned around, and drove to Tecopa.

The truck (F350) in the photo is my height

The rest of the day has been awesome. Shortly after arriving back on the flat farmland I stopped for lunch and also to rest my weary accelerating leg – I’ve got to tense it just so to get the right speed, and keeping that up for hours gets tiring. I can’t jam it in anywhere, but more on this later. Lunch was at a fast food joint that I’d never heard of before – A&W All American Food – and it was fantastic. It was the first meal in the USA that I actually enjoyed. I’ve tried a lot of different places since arriving, including spending a fortune in San Francisco because I refuse to believe that a place with so many eateries could have such ordinary food. In every place, the food was okay, but not great. Kinda meh. At this eatery, the food was, while admittedly fast food, really nice and enjoyable. Halfway through the burger I was so stunned at this strange sensation that I started trying to pick a fault with the food, and the only thing I could find was that it was a standard fast food sugar-bread bun instead of a proper lightly toasted/fried hamburger bun. But I actually really enjoyed the meal.

YES, I AGREE THAT THE MOJAVE IS A GOOD PLACE TO PUT THESE! (expand thumbnail...)

The next many hours were a combination of backroad and interstate driving and I loved every minute of it, barring the interstates around Bakersfield (the highways around the main towns in California are seriously screwed). The drive across the Mojave desert was just as expected, a ribbon of road curling through the saltbush (or whatever it is) colonnaded by mountains. At one stage I started to worry about the car, then I noticed all the skid marks and remember passing the things in the photo to the left and realised the crosswinds must be vicious. There’s no warning signs or anything, but once aware of the crosswinds control of the car was much easier. Stopped at a truckstop and the wind was almost bowling people over. I took a lot of photos while driving, but of course only half of them worked as they were all shot blind.

mmm...

Getting to Tecopa was fun. The GPS has been (mostly) awesome for getting me places, but the instructions to get to the Tecopa hostel (The Ranch House Inn) were verbal because GPS road numbering isn’t right for their area. I mean, I absolutely love it when my GPS says “Drive for 102 miles, then veer left”, but I love the following verbal instructions more: “When you hit Baker (not Bakersfield) take the 127 north for about an hour. When you come to the first turn, it’s to the right, take it…” A road you can travel on for an hour with no turns. Love it. I’ve always wanted to drive on a lonely American desert backroad that just stretches into the distance, and today I did. A big fat grin crawled across my face unbidden. The photo was taken at a spot where I’d pulled off the road to look at something. As a bonus feature, it was on this road that I finally figured out how to use the cruise control and save my poor leg which had been hurting from fatigue.

I typed the previous entry while watching this change. The colours were richer than in the photo

I finally arrived in Tecopa at the hostel and the proprietor is very friendly and pointed out a lot of fun stuff to do in Death Valley. She’s also the one that gave me the verbal directions yesterday, and loves the desert here. I scampered up a rickety wooden tower to watch the colours change for a desert sunset sky. There’s also a longhair gray cat that’s very talkative and friendly.

Time for a moonlight desert walk…