California - Part One

After we got our fill of the Grand Canyon we headed towards Las Vegas as a good "layover" city between Arizona and California. Since we didn't want to get a hotel in Vegas, and also didn't want to risk losing any of our road trip money in the casinos, we just camped outside the city on the shore of Lake Mead, which is really just over the hill from Las Vegas. But since you can't be that close to Vegas without at least seeing it, we drove through it the next morning. We just drove down the famous Las Vegas Strip, as we figured that would be the quickest and easiest way to cram as much Vegas as we could into a five minute tour. I found it to be much cleaner looking than I had expected and it really was fun to see... I can definitely see its appeal as a vacation destination!

Shortly after Vegas we drove through the hottest, lowest, driest place in North America: Death Valley! Now, with that lead in it sounds like it would be pretty much the most depressing place in the country to visit, right? However, Scott and I both thought that it was strangely beautiful... although it probably helped that we avoided the skin-melting temperatures that the region is so famous for (it was only about 65 during our drive through). I expected it to be a flat expanse of nothing, but it is actually surrounded on all sides by these really interesting mountains and hills and I saw some of the most fabulous cloud formations that I have ever seen. The worst part about it was that it was an absolute wind tunnel. We tried to get out of the car to take some pictures and we were about blown over... literally!

After Death Valley, we quickly learned that California is a huge state that is home to every climate you can imagine. Just beyond the hottest, lowest, driest point in North America, you will find the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Its snowy peaks are gorgeous from a distance, and then you keep driving closer and closer and realize that, at some point, you are going to have to drive over those snowy peaks. So in a matter of hours we went from the landscape above to this!

It really was beautiful and the road conditions never got any worse than some slightly wet pavement... but I could not for the life of me convince my nerves that our situation was really not that bad. The department of transportation really does a great job of scaring the crap out of anyone who isn't familiar with the area, as every ten yards there are signs like "Snow chains required," "Icy conditions next 22 miles," "Beware of extreme curves," and so on. Now I'm sure that these signs are quite pertinent during the intense winter months, but in mid-April they just made me nervous for nothing, as the most snow that we saw on the ground was probably around four inches. Lucky for me, Scott did not seem so freaked out by these signs (which may as well have read "Imminent death ahead" in my mind) and he calmly drove us over the mountain and we were out of the snow in about 20 minutes.

Once we descended the mountain, California became a very familiar feeling place. Compared to the landscape of desert, rocks, and more rocks that we had been driving through for the past week or so, the green hills and farms that lay across the Sierra Nevadas may as well have been rural Virginia... it felt very much like home.

California countryside

The rest of our drive through California was not as exciting as the first few hours were, but it is definitely a beautiful state! When we were about ten miles from the coast it still looked like we were in the middle of an agricultural wonderland. There were farms that had fields going straight to the ocean's edge, which is not something that I'm used to seeing. That night we camped at a campground outside of Santa Cruz, which is an adorable coastal town located on Monteray Bay. We could not see the ocean from out campsite, but we were just over the hill from it and, with that proximity to the water, came a fantastic thunderstorm that night. Up until this point we had been lucky not to have any serious encounters with rain while camping, but all of our good luck had apparently run out as we got a solid three hours of intense lightning, thunder, and torrential rain that started around midnight. Nothing worse came from the storm besides having to deal with wet camping gear the next day, but it did make for a rather sleepless night.

Our first view of the Pacific Ocean

Scott and I are currently in Salt Lake City, UT (getting ready to head to Moab today) and I promise that at some point I will finally get caught up on the blog :)  Internet access only comes along every few days on the road, so it is slow going to get these posts online. Still to come are stories and pictures from our adventures in San Francisco, Napa Valley, Redwood National Forest, and Utah... so stay posted!