Leaving Death Valley

Tuesday, Jan. 24 - Day 7

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Leaving Death Valley

Today is the day we leave this beautiful park.  Again, I can't say enough about what a surprise it was or how beautiful it was.  You have to have the time, and take the time, to get off the main roads and drive the drives to the many points of interest, but every one of them was well worth the trip and the time.  Dave even said he was not disappointed in any of our drives -- we all thought every point of interest lived up to its billing and its pictures.

We thought we would try for an early start this morning, so our target time was 8:00 to leave.  Mazie had overslept yesterday, not that we had a definite starting out time then but it was daylight when she woke up, and she made Dave eat cold cereal for breakfast so she wouldn't hold us up.  Isn't that bizarre!  Anyway, she got David up at 4:00 a.m. this morning to make sure they were on time.  Go figure.  We had decided to have the breakfast buffet down at the Furnace Creek restaurant so we didn't have to mess with breakfast, so we were on the road, after Joe's diet coke stop up at the general store, by 8:00.  When we pulled in to the restaurant, we drove past 2 test cars and the "pilot" car, all taped up so we couldn't tell the brand name.  Mazie and I had never seen these before, but Joe had, and knew what they were -- cars that some manufacturer was having test driven up here.  We could see the front seat was full of computers and stuff.

After we left the restaurant, I got on the phone to make us a reservation for tonight in Pahrump, and Joe missed the turn, so we had to find a place to turn around.  But it worked out ok because we got to turn around at one of the points of interest we had missed -- Golden Canyon -- which was a wall of red rock.  There was a trail here, but we didn't take the time to hike it.

As we are leaving the park, our heads are swiveling from side to side (and so was the RV) as we try to catch our last glimpses of the beautiful views here. We were still seeing snow in the mountains.  It was cold this morning, and we are pretty sure there was snowfall last night at the higher elevations.

We chose the easiest route out of the park, with the least grade, Hwy 190 to State Line Road, then 160 into Pahrump.  We made a fuel stop there ($3.199), then headed on through town out to our campground, Terrible's Lakeside Resort and Casino.  This turned out to be a really nice campground, with a fishing lake (no license required), full facilities, and beautiful mountain views.  And I even won a little in this casino.  The food here was good too, and pretty reasonable.

When I called to make the reservations, I made sure they had laundry facilities as we had not been able to do laundry since we left home.  So as soon as Joe stopped the RV, we carried our laundry over and I got started on it while he got us parked, leveled, and set up.  As soon as my loads were out of the washer, Dave and Mazie started theirs.  When we finished with the laundry, Mazie and I headed back into town to the grocery store, with a quick stop at one of the casinos in town.  We went over to the restaurant at the campground for dinner -- prime rib (9.99) for Dave and Mazie. When we finished eating, Dave headed back to the RV but the other three of us stayed and played for a while.  But this casino did not have Mazie's Bombs Away, so she and Joe didn't stay as long as I did, if you can believe that.

We will be heading to Quartzsite tomorrow, back in Arizona.  So our Death Valley trip is over, but Quartzsite is always an adventure this time of year, so I'll do a little summary of our days there.