I know, I know - its been over a week, but we were chasing our tails and even drove in the dark. Our wee trip to Phoenix was a visit to the apple store to get Vanessa a new phone and then we hooted up the highway to Barstow, our jumping off point for the Mojave Desert.
Originally we had thought we could combine the Mojave and Death Valley, but we couldn’t. Finding a place to stay was part of it, so we ended up back in Barstow. We did change Motels on the second night, just to make ourselves think we were still moving in a forward direction. After Death Valley, however, we managed to keep our illusion of forward momentum going for The Sequoia National Park and Yosemite.
In both Sequoia and Yosemite we were awestruck. All of our cathedrals, temples and every other human edifice, ancient or modern, religious or pagan, pale in comparison to the works of nature. We did, of course, manage to decimate the sequoias, but the granduer of granite that is Yosemite still stands.
Again, whenever we get to post them, our photos won’t begin to truly convey what we have seen, let alone how it made us feel.
Oh yes! On a lighter note - look what we came across in its new home in the Arizona Desert. London Bridge. Unbelievably, it’s one of the biggest tourist attractions in Arizona, second only to the Grand Canyon.
In amongst all of that, we did suffer some more carnal moments. In the Mojave we took the short offroad section that takes you to the Kelso Dunes. We heard a weird noise, but rutted roads are weirdly noisy. A mile later we pulled up and there was another noise. We’d heard something like it before, that kind of hiss that you hear under pylons. Yep there were pylons. At the boot I realised that this hiss was much closer than the pylons. It was one of our tyres. I didn’t have to do much searching as it was easy to spot - we’d picked up a set of keys!
It’s quite a thing with the hire companies: they may well rent you an AWD vehicle, but that doesn’t include any permission to use it anywhere you might need it. Offroad is out of bounds. We had opted for the RSA+ (Roadside Assistance, not sure what the ‘+’ means), but we weren’t at the roadside. So, all our cases out and on with the ‘get you home’ tyre. Sorry, that’s tire here and ‘tire’-some it was.
Anyway, we got back to our Motel and phoned the hire company. I cannot even begin to explain our exchange, but when we finally got to the point where she realised that we didn’t need rescued, but just needed a puncture repaired, she said we had to go to an Enterprise place in town and they would give us a new car.
I’d just a good hour fitting a useless ‘get you home’ tyre and driven the fifty miles ‘home’, but they gave us a replacement car because the neareast tyre place was thirty miles away. So now we have a six seater Mitsubishi Overlander. It was with this swap we became aware of yet another problem - our rental agreement runs out on the 23rd
It was yesterday at around noon that we finally reached The Pacific Coast of North America, it was good to see the ocean again. Our plan was to hug the coast as much as possible all the way up through California and then Oregon, getting to Seattle on the 29th. First we’d need to sort out the rental.
I had applied online and I was pretty certain that I’d asked for the car until the 29th. It turns out that it defaults to a maximum of thirty days, it ‘should’ be possible to renew it but they cannot look at it before the thirty day mark - that’s on the 23rd. The headache is that National are only at the airports although Alamo and Enterprise are all part of the same group, it’s almost impossible to get them to speak to one another. Fingers crossed for the 23rd.
