Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Heading for a family reunion in Minnesota

We are off on another adventure in our Sportsmobile Dodge Sprinter van conversion. We are so lucky - our van is our home away from home, fully equipped for our needs. 


We left Thursday afternoon, October 2, 2014. Traffic was terrible heading east out of Los Angeles. Where is everyone going at 2 p.m. on a weekday afternoon?

We drove as far as Yucca Valley (north of Palm Springs and on the way to Joshua Tree National Park). We have a favorite Mexican Restaurant, Las Casitas, discovered by our son Chris, and the Wal-Mart parking lot is a convenient camping spot. We can load up on junk food for the trip, make our bathroom visits, and sleep in their well lit and noisy concrete pad! But it is free!

The next day we were well rested and ready to forge on towards Las Vegas. We had breakfast in another favorite, the Carousel Restaurant just outside of 29 Palms. We love the drive through the desert with its volcanic craters, distant hills and mountains, dry lakes with salt deposits, tiny towns, and light traffic. We saw an impressive installation of solar panels with acres of mirrors.

We entered the Mojave Desert National Preserve, drove past the Kelso Dunes (we have camped there in the past), and stopped to visit the park headquarters at Kelso Depot, an abandoned railroad depot, preserved as a museum. Even on a Friday, there were lots of visitors. We gathered information for a return visit when we can spend more time hiking and looking at the artifacts from Indian, mining, and ranching days.

We got to I-15 and joined the lines of cars, trucks, and motorcycles (yes, there was a motorcycle convention going on) heading for Vegas. We got there about 1 p.m. in time to do a little shopping at the outlet mall and check into the camp ground at Main Street Station. It is just a huge parking lot with hook ups and a few trees, but cheap and a convenient place to stay and have a little R & R.


We were just a couple blocks from the Fremont Street Experience so went to see what was happening. They had it all blocked off and were checking IDs for people to get in. We never did quite figure out why! Were there too many bikers around and they were worried about trouble makers? Did they have particularly sexy entertainers walking around (I saw a few that were rather remarkable)? The show was rather unremarkable, but they have a new attraction – Zip lining down the center of the street! That was certainly fun to watch.

1 comment:

  1. Yay, you tried Las Casitas! Was it as good as we said?

    That solar installation you saw must have been Ivanpah which opened February 13th and is California's largest concentrating solar power plant at 392 megawatts. Actually, one article says it's the largest CSP in the world. It may also be CA's last CSP because photovoltaic panels have come down so quickly in price and are now cheaper than CSP. CSP requires every mirror to move independently to keep the sun always reflected onto a central tower, heating various substances to thousands of degrees to drive turbines. One great advantage of doing that is the heat generated sticks around and can generate power through the whole night in some designs. That advantage may drive more CSPs to be built once photovoltaics provide enough power during the day.

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