Blogs from Death Valley National Park, California, United States, North America - page 4

We started the day by me catching a taxi to Wynn casino where I had to pick up the Hertz rental car, while Tanya and the kids had breakfast. Got back and packed the car, said goodbye to our new found friends Marc and Geraldine from Sydney and were on the road by 915(a tiny bit later than planned) Navigated out of town with a few near-misses of getting onto The wrong off ramp, but got the hang pretty quickly. Cruised through the pretty desolate but scenic landscape and hit the Death Valley National park after about 2 hours. We were amongst a lot of traffic who seemed to have all come on a day trip from Vegas, as most of them didn't seem to continue on once we started hitting more of the sites and ... read more

After 1800 miles and 29 hours of driving, we reached the stunning Death Valley National Park. Intermittent sheets of rain pounded on our car top as we drove from St. George, Utah through Las Vegas and up through Indian Springs where the rain was so hard, all vehicles had slowed to a crawl. The evening TV weather reported severe flooding in Las Vegas that would continue into Wednesday! Our timing was fortunate. And, the storms produced magnificient clouds that can be seen in our photos. The heat in the valley is stupifying and can be escaped in the air conditioned lodgings, visitor center, restaurants and general stores inside the park. Or one can drive into the surrounding mountains and hike in pleasant summer temperatures. We stayed two nights at Furnace Creek Ranch -190 feet below sea ... read more

Tuesday 24/07/12 – After feeding and talking with the cows next to our tent this morning, we headed onto another crazy freeway. We headed towards San Francisco and by the time we made it to the Golden Gate Bridge the clouds and fog had lifted and we could see all around the bay. The bridge was pretty cool to ride a bike across, it was kind of like big stacks of Lego. There wasn’t much traffic either as we planned the route so we would miss the morning rush hour. We rode across the bridge with the occasional glance at the bay, city and islands. We headed through the city, across downtown and onto the Bay Bridge which connects San Francisco to the Eastern suburbs. This bridge was two layers and went for over 7 kilometres, ... read more

Drive from Las Vegas to Mt. Whitney Portal camp ground, and straight through Death Valley.... read more

There are competitors for the title of the world's greatest canyon. Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet is said to be considerably deeper and longer than the Grand Canyon. Colca Canyon in Peru is also deeper and longer than the Grand Canyon. Tara in Montenegro touts itself as second to the Grand Canyon but, alas, it looks like Tara is number 4 at least. We haven't seen Yarlung Tsangpo – yet – but we have seen the others and, for us, there is no argument. The Grand Canyon of the Colorado River in Arizona is the most spectacular canyon in the world that we have seen. The debate of course is all pretty silly as, in our opinion, it should be. There doesn't seems to be any real agreement on what constitutes a canyon as such. There is ... read more