Something Understood

C and I drove down to her parents' place in Henderson, Nevada, just outside of Las Vegas. It was chilly, but sunny down there. Las Vegas is a mad, sprawling place, but it's generally at its least crowded around Christmas, and the mountains that ring the Las Vegas Basin are gorgeous.

We did a lot of driving over the past week. We went down in two days, stopping to have lunch with my relatives in Carmel, and spending the night in Bakersfield before cutting across the Mojave Desert. See the route here.

The day after Christmas, we drove over to the Grand Canyon, which was beautiful and cold with the odd sprinkling of snow. Here's the route map for that trip. On the way back towards Flagstaff from the Grand Canyon, we stopped off at two other National Park sites which happen to be right next to each other. The first, Wupatki National Monument, is one of the largest pueblo structures in the Southwest. Around the time that the Normans were settling in Britain, this was the largest and most important pueblo on the Colorado Plateau. We also visited Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument, which is only about 25 miles south of Wupatki, and which volcano was erupting around the same time that Wupatki was being settled. The geography and flora are wildly diverse around here; high-desert mesa scrubland gives way to piñon pine forest around the next hill.

Driving back home, we through Death Valley National Park and up the Owens Valley on the Eastern Side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. We visited Manzanar National Monument, which, during World War II, was an internment camp for more than 10,000 Japanese internees. It's cold and windy in the winter, and hot and dusty in the summer. Much of the physical structures of the site are gone, stripped soon after the war for building materials. The street layout remains, and a driving tour gives you an idea of the rows after rows of wood and tarpaper sheds that were the homes for thousands. The interpretive exhibit in the former auditorium is excellent. We spent the night in Bishop, and got back on the road by 6:30 this morning. We continued North, dipped back into the corner of Nevada, and then turned West to head through Luther Pass in the Sierras, which picks up US-50 just South of Lake Tahoe. Through the mountains, past Folsom (of Folsom Prison fame), Sacramento, and then home. Here's the route.

Each of the three drives was more than 600 miles, and I'm going to treat the car to a wash and wax tomorrow.