Month: November 2023

So we departed beautiful Bakersfield and headed out of farm country into the wastelands: mountains and desert, sometimes mountainous desert and sometimes deserted mountains and sometimes just plain desert.

The closer we got to Death Valley, the more deserted desert-like it became. We knew some of the roads into the park were closed due to the hurricane that dumped nearly 3 inches of rain – as much as the region gets in a year – back in August but trusted Google maps not to steer us wrong. With one eye on our gas gauge, we rolled along the straight-as-an-arrow desert highway with only the occasional car in sight. Since there were no signs for a rest stop, you could just stop your car on the road, hop out, and help quench the dry desert (well, at least I could) with nary a worry about oncoming traffic.

Since Death Valley is a, well, valley, you have to go over mountains to get there. Knowing much of the park is at or below sea level, it was a tad disconcerting the higher we went, until we were about 5,000 feet before heading back down. Unfortunately, we had caught up to another car by this time and they were going just a bit too slow, so it wasn’t long before I was pumping on dubious brakes in our dubious rental car that suddenly started juddering and grinding and generally making me wonder if the blasted car would make it to the bottom.

Fortunately, we managed to pass the slow poke and not burn out the brakes by the time we hit sea level. It’s hard to tell when you’re in Death Valley National Park other than the sign that tells you and directing you to the ranger’s station to pay the admission fee because it didn’t look much different that the last 50 miles we had traversed.

I of course was expecting it to be hot, what with Death Valley supposed to be one of the hottest places on the planet and all, and the 80 degrees was pleasantly warm compared to the mostly 60s we had experienced during the trip so far. But it wasn’t blazing hot, despite the signs advising you to turn your car air conditioning off so the engine didn’t overheat. 

It turns out Death Valley isn’t hot all the time. In fact, it was downright cool in the mornings as deserts tend to be, but there was plenty of sunshine and blue skies. We obviously had missed the summer heat; Death Valley temperatures in the dead of winter apparently top out in the 60s. Who knew?

We did stay in an interesting hotel; lodging and dining options are pretty limited in the park. It was built a hundred years ago and used to be a winter getaway for the Hollywood crowd; it has been renovated and was located in an area with a natural spring, so it was lush with gardens, flowers and even date palms. To access the lobby and our room, you walked through a long tunnel and took an elevator up. It was quite the oasis, which if you’re interested in going is what the name of the hotel is. 

The park and hotel had only been open for two weeks since all the roads into the park had been washed out, so certain amenities were lacking. Such as peace and quiet due to the crew that was trimming the aforementioned date palms, so there were truck backing-up blares and chain saw roars and the like. The hotel restaurant also had not yet opened, necessitating us to drive a mile to the hotel’s sister resort where you had an option of dining at the saloon or the buffet. 

We had been warned about the buffet and as we looked it over our first night – a meager selection of salad stuff, some chicken nugget things that had obviously not been cooked anytime recently, and some suspicious looking stuff to make what I assume could be called fajitas. All for $36 per person. We passed and spent $65 each for what turned out to be a pretty good steak at the saloon.

The hotel did have a great pool, kept heated to a nice 87 degrees, and if you got over the weirdness of swimming in a pool in the middle of Death Valley it was great, until you got out and realized being wet in 80-degree temperatures in a place with absolutely no humidity is pretty darn chilling.

Being a person who is partially cold-blooded and who like a lizard doesn’t fully function to peak efficiency below 70 degrees, I set aside my disappointment that we were not stepping out into the world’s greatest toaster oven and headed out to see the sights: Badwater Basin – the lowest point in North America at 282 feet below sea level – and that still had a small lake from the rains along with what looked like snow but turned out to be salt and basalt, the Devil’s Golf Course that had weird salt formations but had nothing to do with golf that I could see, massive golden sand dunes, and rock formations in what they called an artist’s palette of colors.

Perhaps the best sight was a detour we made on our way back from dinner one night, heading a couple of miles away from our hotel and pulling off the road in the pitch dark. And I mean pitch dark. With the stars in the big sky the only illumination. Pretty special.

So we enjoyed the park, but my advice is if you want to fully appreciate the essence of Death Valley go in July when they say your car tires can melt on the pavement.

We headed out toward our last destination, Las Vegas, but not before calculating how much gas we needed to drive the couple of hours to get there. I carefully measured out about three gallons since the only place for miles around that sold gas was selling it for $8.20 a gallon – captive audience indeed – and we hit the road.

Vegas. Whew. After Death Valley, it was some culture shock. We had been before, so knew what to expect, but geez, talk about sensory overload. We burned off the last of our gas touring the Strip before happily returning our jalopy to Hertz. 

The Strip is crowded at the best of times, but we happened to be there a couple of weeks before the big Formula 1 car race was to take place. They had spent $500 million to put on the race and weeks erecting lights (the race was to be at night) and grandstands along the course. This meant there were lanes closed and road work and gridlock on the Strip. 

This was a problem our first night when we had to get from our hotel, Mandalay Bay, the couple of miles to the Venetian, since we had tickets to see the newly opened Sphere, the $2 billion global attraction. After waiting 10 minutes in line to get a taxi, it took us about 20 minutes to get to the Venetian, where we had to walk through the lobby, through the casino, through the convention center, over the long bridge to the Sphere, stand in line with a huge crowd, go through security, have a guy wave a wand over you, before we finally got in. It was probably a good half-mile hike that F’s non-existent knees did not enjoy in the slightest.

The Sphere experience was interesting, highlighted by the AI robot that was a bit too lifelike and made you rethink all those science fiction movies about robots taking over the world. The show itself – an hour-long documentary – was like an IMAX movie on steroids with shaking seats and state-of-the-art sound effects. After the lengthy walk back and the half-hour wait for another taxi, we made it back to our hotel.

We had tickets for the Carlos Santana concert for the next night – our last before flying home – but the concert was in our hotel, so we spent that day chilling by the pools, or “beach” as Mandalay Bay calls it. We were forbidden to take anything to the beach, including water bottles, and we opted not to pay for a reserved pool-side lounge chair ($75 each, plus another $75 for an umbrella), cabana ($325), or gazebo ($500) and managed to grab a couple regular, un-reserved loungers. 

We were not surprised by the prices since one of the first things I noticed in our room were the $24 bottles of water, the $15 for two cups of Keurig coffee, and the “romance” box for $75 that I won’t tell you what it contains (no, we didn’t splurge, but once again Google is your friend). I didn’t even look at how much the mini-bar might cost since there was a sign that cautioned you that it was sensor activated.

After dinner and losing our obligatory $10 each at the slot and poker machines, we watched Carlos and company rock us out in a fabulous show at the House of Blues. A wonderful way to end what had been a rocky trip from the beginning.

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A final note: a few days after we got home, we got a bill in the mail, which we were expecting since we had driven on a toll road at one point in California. The toll was $6. 

The handling fee from Hertz? $9.

As our adventure continues, we check in to get our rental car, the office of which is conveniently located around the corner from our hotel. Once the paperwork is completed, we go back through our hotel lobby, pass the convention rooms, up an elevator, and into a large parking garage. There we see a cluster of cars under a large Hertz sign.

We push the key fob so that what will be our car for the next several days will greet us with lights and a beep. Nothing.

I walk closer, pushing the key fob. Nope. Nada.

We check the license plate number from the rental documents. No car.

Finally, a Hertz employee saunters over and asks have we tried any of the cars on the other side of the parking garage. I refrain from saying no, why would we check cars that are not under the Hertz sign. We slowly make our way over to the few cars and a sinking sensation comes over me. Surely not. It can’t be. Not the only one in the entire garage that doesn’t have California license plates. I push the fob. Of course, the little sub-compact SUV that doesn’t look anything like the mid-sized SUV we paid for beeps and lights up. The one with Florida license plates, which in my neck of the woods marks you as a tourist with, shall we say, a unique driving style, which I assume will be the same in California. So much for blending in.

For some reason, the trunk of the car – I’m not going to say what make of car it is, but the old joke on them is they are often Found On Road Dead – won’t open. In fact, it doesn’t seem to have any latch, button, handle … anything. Nothing inside to push, either. Puzzled, and getting more frustrated by the second, the rental employee comes over again, not even trying to hide her smirk at the tourists who are soon to be from Florida, and shows us how to open the trunk.

Yes, let’s reinvent the wheel here: the latch is hidden inside a recess in one of the rear lights. And the trunk door swings open rather than up, revealing a space that would easily fit into our bathroom on the train we had left the day before. I squeezed one of our two suitcases in after we decided not to go all the way back down, through the hotel, etc. and wait in line to in the unlikely event Hertz would give us what we had paid for.

So off we went, leaving Oakland behind and heading across the bay to find the mighty Pacific, which turned out to be right over those mountains over there in Half Moon Bay. A fine sight to see it was, the day clear and cool, the scenery a feast for the eyes, excitement in our hearts as we headed down the coast. Our destination: fabled Monterey.

Along the way, we stop in at the northern end of Monterey Bay at Santa Cruz, home to a state university where the athletic teams are known as the Banana Slugs. If that doesn’t make the city unique enough, there is a 24-acre boardwalk and amusement park stretching along most of the city’s beautiful beach.

It also has a pier that you can drive out on that is lined with shops and restaurants. We were getting into our car after a delicious lunch of clam chowder when we heard this godawful hooting and bellowing. Looking over the side of the pier we got a look at our first seals in California, although technically speaking they were actually sea lions and there is a difference between the two that I won’t go into here and if you really want to know you can Google it like we did.

At last we arrive in Monterey and check into our hotel, with fabulous views overlooking a beach and the bay, sea otters bobbing about in and atop the kelp forests. Most of the bay is one giant sea sanctuary, where the wildlife is protected. Monterey itself is a bit more bustling and touristy than I had thought it might be, but still with a wonderful ambiance and plenty to do, including a great aquarium.

The beach out our balcony apparently is a great place to scuba dive from shore, and we saw lots of wet-suited divers heading out to play in the kelp with the otters. We also saw a couple of people in swimsuits wade in and swim about as if it were South Beach in the summer; keep in mind the water temperature in the bay was in the low 50s. One woman was swimming around for more than 30 minutes – long enough for me to look up how long someone could be in water that cold before hypothermia set in. (The answer is about an hour.)

The only problem with our room was that it was noisy at night, what with the sea lions at the nearby Fisherman’s Wharf barking and woofing it up all night. Reminded me of home with the neighborhood dogs and coyotes making a racket at night.

We drove down the Pacific Coast Highway through Big Sur. Wow! What can I say? It’s better than advertised: Absolutely stunning, breathtakingly beautiful. Waves crashing on the rocks from the glittering blue ocean stretching off to Asia on one side, mountains soaring to the sky on the other. There were even redwood trees – smallish by Redwood National Park standards, but still impressive. 

So we drove the 50 or so miles down the coast until we got to where the road had been washed out, turned around and headed back. I’m eyeing the gas gauge, so we stop for lunch and gas up in one of the few spots for miles around that have restaurants and gas stations. We had already paid about $5 a gallon – this is California, after all – but this was $6 since we’re miles from anywhere else. That’s when I realize that our rental car had a gas tank of a little more than 10 gallons, and while it got decent mileage I’m wondering how it – and we – will fare once we get out in the desert in a couple of days.

We toured Carmel, technically known as Carmel-by-the-Sea, where Clint Eastwood used to be mayor, and it is every bit as charming as it is billed to be, with a very nice beach and expensive homes climbing up the hills.

The Monterey Peninsula is also famous for its golf courses – Pebble Beach being the most well-known. They have what is known as the 17-Mile Drive that winds around the golf courses and shoreline and beaches and neighborhoods of gazillion-dollar mega mansions. I don’t know which is worse: that they actually charge $11.75 (WTF?) for the right to drive around or that we actually paid it.

After loading up on hotel tissues since my sinus issues have not cleared up yet, we fondly bid adieu to Monterey and head out into central California. Our destination this time is less defined; the original plan was to drive south and then drive back up the Pacific Coast Highway to the other end of where it was closed. By the time we got to San Simeon, we decided that was enough and headed back out to central California.

San Simeon, of course, is a castle built by William Randolph Hearst, of whom I had more than a passing knowledge of since we had to study him in journalism school. He was a notorious newspaper publisher in the late 1800s and 1900s who was famous as one of the forerunners of sensational “journalism,” inciting wars and supporting the Nazi party and the like. Fortunately, journalism has matured since then and is far more responsible. Like many other rich people, he was all in on extravagance and build a castle just because he could. 

We didn’t tour the castle – we were told there were many steps, which require knees (which F does not currently have, for those who have not been paying attention) to navigate – but had a nice lunch at a quaint motel restaurant. But the real highlight was a couple of miles up the road: the elephant seals.

A beach complete with a boardwalk for viewing offered an unbelievable sight: Maybe a hundred or more seals lolling on their backs, white bellies catching the rays or flapping sand on their backs with their flippers, looking like a bunch of plump Americans charring themselves on a Caribbean beach. Occasionally a few would ungainly hump down to the water through the crashing waves where they would transform themselves into sleek, graceful torpedoes cavorting in the cold Pacific. Mesmerizing in their magnificence.

Elephant seals are so named because of the protruding proboscis of the males. While we wouldn’t dream of describing people with large noses that way – hey, you must be an elephant human! – the seals didn’t seem to have taken offense at the name we had given them.

We said goodby to the Pacific and headed east into farm country. It’s no wonder so much of our food comes from California: they have some big farms out there. We’re driving along with mountains in the distance on both sides of the valley, fields spreading for miles in all directions. The fields were so big you could ride a tractor down one row and have to stop for lunch before returning. (OK, I made that up.)

We passed the hours trying to figure out what the crops were, since the climate – at least so far – allows crops to be gown year-round. Broccoli, spinach, something we weren’t sure of, grapes, oranges, something dozens of people were planting … We passed miles and miles of trees we didn’t recognize, but F’s extensive research eventually revealed them as pistachios. We looked for roadside stands selling local crops like they do in the South, but it wasn’t until the next day we scored some local pistachios at a fruit and nut shop.

We saw some strange red fruit growing on trees that were not apples and couldn’t figure out what they were until we stopped at a crossroads by some huge building and saw red pulp pouring out a conveyor belt into a big truck. We looked up the name of the company on the building and realized they made pomegranate juice. Go figure.

I realize many people might find it odd that we were so fascinated driving for hours amid farms and fields, but we try to find our fun wherever we are. You have your eco-tourists; call us agro-tourists.

We spent the night in Bakersfield, whose main claim to fame is that it is the home of the only Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives to be deposed, although they have not had time yet to erect a sign on the outskirts of town to proudly proclaim that achievement.

I had been led to believe that there were some nice parts of the town, but somehow they managed to elude us, making me wax nostalgic just a tiny bit for Oakland.

So, on to the wilds of the desert and the heat of Death Valley! I’m pretty sure I’ll need a jacket.

As vacations go, this one had been more than four years in the planning. And it has been jinxed from the start.

It started out as a California junket, a circuit of the national parks and scenic highways and byways.

Everything was booked: plane tickets, hotels, car rental. Stops in Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks, Monterey and Carmel, a drive down the Pacific Coast Highway, Death Valley, Vegas …

And then came Covid.

Everything was canceled. Yes, we got our money back, but not the hours of planning and missed opportunities.

So, we rescheduled for last spring. We started to book stuff, despite the ominous signs. Flooding in Monterey. Record snowfall near Yosemite. Conflicts with the timing. You get the picture. 

In the end, we canceled it again.

So, we are nothing if not adaptable, so we altered our plans and tweaked this and changed that, and our spring trip morphed into a fall …

Train trip!

So the plan was to fly to Chicago and hop on Amtrak’s California Zephyr and take a modified version of our long-planned trip, skipping some of the national parks and ending up in Las Vegas at a Santana concert, which turned out to be the first tickets we booked.

Everything in order, all excited, we eagerly anticipated the third version of this trip. Again, we ignored the storm clouds brewing: We find out that the Pacific Coast Highway was closed halfway down our planned route, necessitating a rerouting. Oh, and most of Death Valley was closed. Why? Because of flooding. In the desert. From a hurricane.

Then, F’s knees suddenly were missing their meniscus (menisci?), and despite the doctors’ efforts, treatments, and promises, they were not getting any better and the pain was not being alleviated. (Only after our return did an MRI show there was also a bone fracture in one knee.) Then I came down with some dread respiratory disease the day before we left that necessitated a lengthy urgent care visit that resulted in negative strep and Covid tests and a bottle of antibiotics in case it was a sinus infection.

But off we went anyway.

Blowing Into The Windy City

Chicago is a great city, with seemingly as many skyscrapers as New York, including what used to be the world’s tallest, the Sears Tower – now called the Willis Tower, although Chicagoans still call it by its former name. Against my better judgment, while up on its Skydeck, we stepped out on the Ledge – a clear but thankfully enclosed ledge jutting out of the side of the building – looking below our feet 103 stories down to the street.

Chicago has a lake and a river, which means you can ride around the city in a boat, and we also rode around in a bus because I wasn’t going to drive in that traffic. 

How bad was the traffic? Our taxi driver couldn’t deliver us to our hotel from the airport after we flew in. Some sort of parade and/or a protest were about to happen as several downtown streets were blocked off – with massive snowplows, no less, even though it was 60 degrees because I guess in Chicago when they block off a street they really, really don’t want you driving down it anyway. He finally dropped us off more or less underneath our hotel along a subterranean street with a couple of layers of streets above. So there we are, starting our vacation off schlepping suitcases along under the city until we came across the parking garage for our hotel, where fortunately we found an elevator to take us to the lobby.

Anyway, after a nice couple of days in the city which included a great dinner with friends, we were ready for a less urban experience and headed for the train station.

All Aboard!

The train was … interesting. Two days and two nights meant we splurged and booked a private room, complete with beds, a chair and sofa (that was one of the beds), a big window, and a private bathroom. It turns out the beds were bunk beds, with the upper berth complete with a safety harness to keep you from bouncing out during the night as we rumbled down some mighty bumpy train tracks at high speed through the vast prairies of that part of America that geographers call the middle of nowhere.

When Amtrak talks excitedly about a grand adventure traveling by train, they leave out the adventure of clambering down a bunk bed ladder in the dark in the middle of the night because you have to pee, your legs getting entangled with the safety harness, as the train sways from side to side and bounces up and down, as you stumble over to our private bathroom. 

People who have campers probably know what I mean by bathroom. It’s the size of a broom closet, although a broom would feel claustrophobic if you threw a mop in there with it. It’s a toilet with a handheld shower head. If you try to do your business standing up, as boys are wont to do, then you risk being slammed into the walls of the stall – if you weren’t already packed so tightly in there you couldn’t really move your body much at all.

The shower promised hot water, but you also had to push a button to get a quick 10 seconds of water before it stopped. Sitting/stooping/standing in a tiny compartment with, fortunately, only 10 seconds of cold water at a time makes for a quick wake-up call. I never did get any of the promised hot water.

After that, I decided I wasn’t going to try my luck at shaving in the tiny sink what with not knowing when the train would lurch or brake or some other movement that would challenge even a safety blade not to draw blood.

But the compartment did provide privacy, and Amtrak did provide decent meals, and the views from the observation car as we wound our way up and over the Rockies were spectacular. We also had an excellent room attendant who went above and beyond the call of duty to keep us supplied with water, ice, tissues for my ever-present sneezing and nose-blowing, etc. and transform our room into a bedroom and vice versa.

We also met some interesting people at meals in the dining car where you shared tables: a young woman from Vienna, Austria; a young couple from Ohio who not only lived in the town I was born in but he had been born in the same hospital as I had; and the first people I think I’ve every met from Nebraska, who were very friendly even though they were worried because the security alarm in their home had gone off back in North Platte and I just assumed that Nebraska was like my neighborhood and didn’t need home alarms.

Perhaps I should rethink my home security needs.

So there was a lot of fun on the train, but in all honesty we were ready to get off when we finally made it to our destination in California. We were a bit off kilter what with trying to regain our land legs and adjust to the time zone changes, and we also thought it curious that Amtrak thought it would be nice to deposit us in … Oakland.

The station is technically in Emeryville, California, but it suspiciously looks like it is surrounded by Oakland except for where it backs up to San Francisco Bay, so in my mind we were in Oakland no matter what the Emeryville Chamber of Commerce and Amtrak wanted me to believe. Not a city on my bucket list, but it was just fine for a one-night stopover.

And I would be remiss not to point out that the best meal we had on our entire trip – scallops for me and a pork chop for F after some Dungeness crab deviled eggs – was in a Latin American restaurant across the street from our hotel in downtown Oakland. I promised the owner or manager that I would mention it on social media, so here’s a shout-out to Bocanova. 

The next morning we picked up our rental car – and it is a doozy – and headed to the Pacific coast. Stay tuned!