Death Valley Part 2- Guaranteed to make geologists salivate! (this means you rach,rennie and lachie)

So i don't know much about rocks, but after travelling in New Zealand and South America, I have a feeling that Death Valley is pornography for Geologists... mostly because my sister Rach and friend Rennie deem to be quite jealous about certain parts of my travels... And for the rest of us, they're pretty amazing rocks!!!

Death Valley...

So for this stage of our journey, we had NOTHING planned, nothing booked, and just an idea that we wanted to drive around the USA and do something of a roadtrip... at this stage of our holiday, we were very low on funds, having both of us decided we desperately needed new ski/snowboard boots while we were in Whistler, along with goggles and gloves etc etc etc! So our budget for the roadtrip was as small as we could make it... as there are no hostels in small towns in America (or even very many in the cities), we pretty much used every website possible to get accommodation under $60 a night... and with the exception of a very few places (Salem Oregon, and Las Vegas, Arizona) this did not get a very high standard of motel... in fact a couple could have been right out of creepy horror movies... we were actually excited when we got a room with a microwave, because it meant we could heat up tinned soup.. woooohoo!

Death Valley itself was mindblowing... I didn't really know what to expect, as I had only seen it used on docos (Brian Cox...) to show how uninhabitable the terrain is, with average summer temperatures of round 47 degrees celcius, maximum recorded temp around 54 degrees... but lucky for us we were there in winter so we had nothing to complain about!

This was touted as an amazing waterfall...
well... it's not like we're jaded travellers or anything, but as we were walking out, a guy came hiking in with his super zoom lens, and I had to warn him that he was probably going to need it to see the waterfall....

...Who's that knocking at your chamber door? ...

...I know, I know, we should have been overwhelmed- what are these magnificent sand dunes doing in Death Valley?
But.... we live in Newcastle, Sam surfs at Birubi and we'd recently been to Huachacina...
we've seen more impressive sand dunes!!!!

OK- so we loved this teeny little town... Beatty, Nevada, was our first real experience of Americana...
It was a blink and you'll miss it town, and we stayed there only because we didn't want to cough up $200 a night to stay in Death Valley National Park- but I think it is one of our most memorable nights in the States.The lady at the front desk of the hotel we stayed at (across the street) recommended the Happy Burro for its Chilli- unfortunately as a vegetarian, I wasn't able to eat there, but we had a couple of jars of the local brew and chatted to a couple of local guys about Australia, America, the army, Vietnam and Burros (wild donkeys) . Then we headed on next door to the Sourdough Saloon which is where all the locals seemed to hang out.  Sam got chatting to a  guy (21- only just legal drinking age in USA) who explained how he was a recovered meth addict, and wanted to get into the army just to see some of the world and also to get a job.  I think staying here really reinforced how lucky we are as Australians to have real options for learning and careers, and as well how we really did avoid the GFC a few years ago.

...This seemed quite an ironic free parking sign... Beatty has a population of about 1000!!

On the road to Nevada...

After our gorgeous day in Yosemite, we drove though to Fresno, CA... And stayed in yet another sort of seedy, hope our car doesn't get broken into kind of motel... This one was pretty much on the freeway, and shared a carpark with "DENNY'S" which is apparently "America's Diner"... it wasn't the worst food we had eaten in USA, but the waiter was really concerned that I wanted a salad with no dressing- I was honestly missing the taste of vegetables by this stage, and didn't feel like coating it with oil and mayo and all the other delightful additives American food seems to have... the clientele was also intriguing- a person of unknown gender (highly made up woman/man) strutted in, and spent at least 15 minutes in the bathroom... not that we made any assumptions of course!!! After we walked outside across to our motel room, Sam told me "Don't look now, BUT..." a guy was dumpster diving for food... like the billboards coming into Fresno announced- this town was "the other California"... The state is huge, and the contrasts between TV and real life were readily apparent, even though we had only been in Cali for about 3 days! The next day we continued to take the scenic route- and encountered the beginnings of the desert... our weeks in the Peruvian desert a distant memory by this time!

...Plainsburg California... it's what I had always imagined Kansas to look like...

Ballarat Ghost Town.... just saying... NSW Pride forever....

Check out our BEAST... seriously- we asked for a "midsized SUV... and ended up with a V8 petrol automatic...

I told Sam I wanted to drive... he preferred hitch-hiking... wouldn't last long on this stretch of road that's for sure!

Yosemite Sam :)

So we were really excited to get out of San Francisco, which just didn't live up to the hype as far as I was concerned- it had nothing on NYC anyway!! We drove to Yosemite on Australia day, had vegemite sandwiches for dinner and we were up bright and early for walking through the snow- a bit different from the usual summer BBQs... It was a beautiful park, well worth it, even though a lot of it was closed because of all the snow. A huge landslide had closed the main road in, so that was crazy, but while we went on a hike up to the top of one of the hills, we actually heard an avalanche/landslide which went for about 5 minutes....  here's some photos, but they don;t really do the place justice...