Adventures In Traveling – Part III

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.

---

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.