Day 15: Death Valley and the looong drive

As announced, this morning started a bit earlier. My alarm clock rang at 5 o'clock, and Uli's alarm clock didn't ring at 5:03, but it doesn't matter, we still got up. This room in Death Valley was very expensive but unfortunately also very stuffy. Of course, if it's always over 40 degrees, you can never properly ventilate the rooms. That's why there are air conditioners in the form of a huge fan above my bed. Turning it off was not an option, so I turned off my imagination as much as possible and covered my throat because it whirled above me all night - I heard it and I felt the wind above me. It wasn't very pleasant, but it made getting up at 5 o'clock not so difficult. Since the sun was supposed to rise at 6:09 a.m., we had to leave at the latest at 5:30 a.m. So we arrived early enough at Zabriski Point and took some pictures of the sunrise and then of the rock formations, where the colors changed every minute. We spent about an hour there. Afterwards, we drove to Dantes View, which was also highly recommended. The view was nice, but not as breathtaking as the views before. The temperatures were still around 30 degrees, which was very pleasant, and there were still few cars on the road. Now we drove to the hotel room to have breakfast and get ready to check out. Since there was a coffee machine with coffee in the room, we helped ourselves here. The coffee tastes at least better than in the office, which is not difficult. This hotel was a kind of ranch - it had a general store, a cafe, a bar, and a steakhouse. That's why hotel rooms were spread out. Since it was the only hotel for miles around, the pricing policy was accordingly. If this place weren't so unique, it would have had a slight touch of the DDR FDGB holiday home from earlier times. There was only certain food available at certain places at certain times. If you wanted to have breakfast at 11 o'clock, tough luck, and if you were already hungry at 3 p.m., too bad! Of course, the selection was more American compared to earlier times, ha! Since we had waited so long for dinner yesterday, we only grabbed a sandwich (6.50 dollars!) from the general store - we didn't have time after all.

We still had a 6-hour drive ahead of us today and didn't want to leave too late. Plus, we wanted to visit the sand dunes in Death Valley. So, as planned, we checked out around 10 o'clock, filled up at the overpriced gas station, and off we went! In the meantime, it was unbearably hot again. A mixture of 'I want to get out of here' and 'but I still want to see a bit more' spread. We stopped at the sand dunes, at one last general store, and then the loooong switchbacks in Death Valley began. I was already feeling dizzy and Uli was complaining regularly. We drove about 1 hour on these switchbacks and were hoping to eventually get out of Death Valley. We encountered one viewpoint, as well as a field with cacti and nothing else, and then we were out. We drove for a long time through the middle of nowhere - no cities, nothing interesting - just driving, and time just didn't pass, 6 long hours and 3 stops later, we arrived at our hotel in Three Rivers. I really hope no one could hear us during this time - the longer the drive, the more bizarre our snippets of conversation, conversations, and movements became. How do truck drivers do it? There is a great drought here, but farmers offer oranges, figs, peaches, figs, wine, etc. on every corner... We are sure that there won't be anything like this in tomorrow's hotel breakfast. After all, we are not in Italy but in the USA!

The only activities at the destination were going out to eat, going through the pictures from today, and writing this text.

Tomorrow we will drive to Sequoia National Park to see the giant sequoia trees and possibly even encounter bears.