Day Four...

I spent the first few hours of my day trying to get AOL to install properly and cleaning out my laptop to make more room for it. Bah. Even though I can get online now, it's still a beast and sometimes hangs when I try to load it up. Still... I guess it's better than nothing. To dial out from our room locally, it costs 50 cents a call. Just to get online and post the journal so far cost a buck 50. Blah. Hopefully it's all sorted out now though. While Jimmie was waiting, he went over to the Gold Spike and bought himself a $2 beer. :) He came back to the room to drink it and fell asleep waiting for me to finish up things on the laptop. Lucky bastard.
We ended up spending most of the day in the room, alternately napping and playing around on the computer. We each got caught up in our mail and sent off messages to everyone (except for those few that we didn't have their email addresses). We didn't end up going outside until around 8pm. We walked over to the El Cortez for some breakfast (hehehe), over to the Golden Spike for some pie, then headed out on our big adventure for the day. Our plan was to go to Death Valley and look at the stars. We had seen online that the Lyrid meteor shower was going on and even though we missed the peak yesterday, there should still be a little bit to see. The drive there was pretty much uneventful. The moon sure was nice though. It was a small sliver and with the clear night sky, stood out very well. We watched it slowly set as we drove, eventually seeing it go down behind a mountain in what looked like a firey crash. We didn't realize there was a $10 admission to Death Valley National Park, but fortunately they had a credit card accepting ticket dispenser there. Yep, it's good to know that in the middle of the great outdoors, they still take Visa. We stopped at Furnace Creek to look at the nice looking hotel there. There was a private function going on, so we didn't go in - just snapped some pics from the outside and ran. Well, not so much ran as walked casually back to the car. Our goal for this trip was Bad Water. That makes no sense. The place where we were headed to in Death Valley is called Bad Water. We were originally going to take West Side Road to get there off of the main highway, but it turned out to be a dirt road (which kinda makes sense now that I think of it). In the half a kilometer that we drove on it, we went over enough washboard to wash all the clothes ever made since the beginning of time. Deciding not to shake the car to pieces and be stranded literally in the Shadow of the Valley of Death, we turned around and used the paved route. Bad Water's the lowest point in North America at some 280+ feet below sea level. And it smells funky. There's a huge salt flat there that gets flooded every so often, then the water evaporates leaving the salt to form cool looking crystalline shapes on the ground. And it smells funky. We walked out on the salt flat, which was still a bit damp (and funky smelling), then walked back to the wooden deck-like thing. No, we didn't hop the fence in blatant disregard of the "Don't walk on this shit" sign, the deck just dipped down to the flat without a fence or anything, literally inviting you to walk on it. I wonder if that's how they collect fines in the park... We took one of the bed coverings from the hotel with us and spread it down on the deck for us to lay down on and look at the stars. It was all very romantic but Jimmie's missing a couple of things I like in a woman. We lay there for well over an hour, looking at the vastness of space and several shooting stars. There were alternating warm and cool breezes blowing in off the salt flat. The warm ones made me glad I wore shorts and the cool ones making me feel stupid. Jimmie didn't mind so much as he was dressed properly and I was acting like a wind-break for him. Everything was awesome... well, awesome until it was time for me to stand up. Laying on cool wooden planks was all the go ahead my lower back needed to seize up. Took me a good five minutes to get into the standing position. While I was doing this, Jimmie walked out on the salt flat again. He said that when he was walking it didn't feel like he was moving at all. No, he hadn't taken any mind-altering drugs, it was just that the featureless grey-white of the salt flat combined with the midnight blue of the sky didn't give you any references to show you that you had moved. I tried it myself, it was pretty cool. When I was on the deck and Jimmie was walking back in, it looked just as if he was walking on water. Quite the optical effect. And funky smelling. I walked off my stiff back soon enough and we were on our way back to Vegas. Before we got into the car, we tried out a few echos in the valley. My rendition of "Guantanamera" was next to perfect. Perfectly awful that is, even the echo didn't like it. Oh yeah, one more thing about Bad Water... we both added some "bad water" of our own. :P
We saw quite a bit of wildlife on the drive to and from Death Valley, and not just the freaks and zombies walking around Vegas. What looked like a chinchilla ran in front of us and almost became a present for one of our loyal readers. Countless mice ran across the road in front of my car. It almost seemed like it was a game to them. I'm pretty sure one lost though. I didn't feel a bump, but then again, my car is very big and heavy and the mouse was pretty much mouse-sized. We saw several bats (a couple which really freaked Jimmie out when we were laying on the deck); what looked like an owl hunting for those tricky mice on the road, and a pair of eyes up in the rocks at the side of the road. From the size of them, possibly a coyote. Two hares also became hood ornaments. The first of which also freaked Jimmie out. Like a good travelling companion, he promptly fell asleep after leaving Badwater. :) When I quick braked and swerved out of the way of the dumb bunny, he woke up rather quickly.
The drive back to Vegas was again mostly uneventful, with a few exceptions. During one very long and boring straight stretch of the highway, I decided to test the upper limits of my car. I got it up to just over 180 km/h. Not quite sure if that was the top top speed, but it was close enough. Don't worry mom, if we would have gotten into an accident, I was wearing clean underwear. :) From over 60 miles out we could see the beam of light that shoots out of the top of the Luxor. Vegas itself caused the whole sky to be lit up like dawn, but Luxor's beam could be seen over and above that.
Our route brought us back into Las Vegas at the very end of the Strip. We saw four cuties taking pictures at 5am at the "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" sign (we gotta do that - cuties that is). This was the best wildlife that we had seen in our 500+ km journey. As we drove along the Strip, we could see teams of two workers picking up all the scattered porn that gets handed out by shifty looking people. If you've ever been here, you'll know what we're talking about. If you haven't, let us know and we'll show you pictures of our massive porn collection... uhhh... I mean... colorful local art. If they didn't clean up this crap on a daily basis, Vegas would soon be buried under a heap of playing card-sized porn... Wait. It already has.
We ended our journey where it began, at the El Cortez coffee shop. We missed out on the super cheap breakfast special by like 25 minutes, but $1.75 for eggs, bacon, hash browns and toast isn't too bad either. Jimmie fell asleep soon after we got back to the hotel. Yet another morning coming home just as the sun is coming up. If we keep this up, I won't have to work too hard at getting back into my work schedule when the vacation is over. Work. Blah.