From Plymouth Reservoir to Lone Pine, California via Death Valley

We woke up at 5 a.m., left home about 6:20, and flew out of Syracuse around 9 a.m.  Taxiing down the runway just ahead of us was this: 

It turns out to be a military "Reaper" drone, also known as a "Predator," flown on training missions out of Syracuse by the Air National Guard.  Turns out they've been flying unescorted out of Hancock for years, at least one has crashed, and apparently everyone knew this but us.

We were in Breeze Airline's "Nicest" seats, which are their equivalent of first class and were quite roomy and comfy, in the bulkhead row at the very front with two whole windows of our very own and plenty of leg room.  Only two seats abreast on each side of the aisle, with clever containers here and there for phones and such and enough room to tip back the seat and recline. We were first off the plane in Las Vegas, too, and the price was right. (No wi-fi, though, so I couldn't track the trip on Google maps.  But, using an old-fashioned road atlas, I'm pretty sure we flew just a little bit south of Canon City where Luke and Monica briefly lived. Ah well.)  All in all, so far, we recommend Breeze. 

In LV, we made it through the airport with surprising speed and ease and met a taxi driver who's a Hoosier college basketball fan and knew all about the recent performance of the Syracuse Orange. And we got out of Las Vegas (Dad driving) with only one wrong turn (my fault), visible on the map above but corrected fairly easily. Our rental car is nothing to write home about but so far we're safe.  And Death Valley was just spectacular.  So many people were so worried about our plans to drive through there in July that I gave in to the stress and bought not one, not two but THREE gallons of water-- which is what the Park Service advises for a summer trip.  They might have been needed, I suppose, had the car died, but it didn't, and we didn't, either.  I didn't even make it through my bottle of Mexican mineral water. 

But what a place.  It's not just a huge bleak desolate valley at all, as I had somehow imagined, but many valleys like that plus a seemingly endless mix of salt flats, Joshua trees, range after range of mountains, sand dunes, an enormous sky, a surprising number of healthy-looking tourists considering that traveling through Death Valley in July will certainly kill you, and, yes, it's true, mind-boggling heat.  The mountains alone are indescribable, each one entirely different from the ones before and after, as if God said let's see how many different kinds of random mountains we can fit into one place -- sandy eroded not-so-big mountains, rocky enormous sky-touching mountains, rainbow-striped spectacular mountains, black volcanic cinder cones, gravelly stacks-of-rocks mountains, and that's just the beginning and before even mentioning the flats and valleys. We didn't make it to Badwater Basin, with the lowest elevation in North America, but along the trip we went from 190 feet below sea level to almost 5,000 feet above and then back down again and partway up again as we dropped into various basins and climbed back out again.  With such a long day both behind and ahead of us, we contented ourselves with pretty much driving straight through and stopped only at a few places for a few moments each, but every moment in every direction was staggering. 

And I guess I'm too tired to write any more right now!