2nd May - On the road to Vegas

Well, today we left the snowy mountains and made our way into the slightly desert- y southern California on our way to Vegas.

We were told at the Visitor Centre in Grant Grove that the road from Sequoia south to Bakersfield/LA is only open every two hours, so we planned around that. A slow start and a quick visit from Scruffy, and we headed towards the Giant Tree Museum. Turns out it is closed until mid-May, which is unfortunate, but life goes on. We did get to drive between some of the huge trees though! So cool! So we waited about 45 minutes in a line of cars for the road to open. Either we are really savvy travellers or people can’t read, but several people asked us if we knew when the road opened. They must’ve missed the two metre wide flashing neon sign two hundred metres back up the road which indicated the times the road opened. Because of the roadworks, the road was only open every two or so hours – as we’d been told at the information centre.

Will driving Betsey between Giant Sequoias. 

They were doing roadworks, so only one lane was open to traffic for about nine miles. We had to follow a ute down some crazy hairpin twists and turns. In those nine miles we dropped about 3000 feet. It was pretty hairy! Then a few more twists and turns (actually a lot – it was so zig-zaggy that many of the turns were recommended to be driven at 10 miles an hour!), and we were at the bottom of the valley. Betsey and Will were relieved to be back on flat ground! We drove through Three Rivers and several other small hamlets on our way to Las Vegas.

We passed through orange groves and endless vineyards and went past huge Lake Kaweah. It was quite a big, but low, lake with lots of people fishing on the shore and in boats. We saw a big collection of house boats too, so it must be a pretty popular tourist destination, probably for people from LA.

We found the RV park we had planned to go to outside Bakersfield on freeway 58 to Vegas. My first trailer park! Full hook-ups and cable (not that we have a TV). Lots of the trailers looked as if they had not moved in years – I guess these are permanent homes for some people, which at $150 a week isn’t bad (can’t remember the monthly rate). We paid $26 which we pretty happy with, as it meant we could have showers – more exciting than you’d think, but it had been a little while for us…! We also did three loads of laundry – the first since San Francisco –that equalled fresh sheets and clean PJs – yay! It also meant we could turn the lights on in the RV and charge the batteries on everything without worrying about flattening the battery.