Death Valley Days (Well, Day) (Singular)

At the Borax Works. Without a 20-Mule Team in sight.

Today was a Death Valley Day. Just one. No need for more than that.

There were visitors visiting and one of the local tourism options selected for tourist fun was Death Valley National Park.  It's only a two-hour drive from Las Vegas, making it the closest full-fledged national park to the City of Sin.  (For what it's worth, I don't understand the phrase "full-fledged."  I'm not aware of anything ever being deemed merely "partially-fledged."  Or even unfledged.  You are either full-fledged are there is no fledging involved.  Period.  End of fledging.)

When you drive in from Las Vegas, taking the scenic shortcut of Bell Vista Road, past the Amargosa Opera House (the one in the video from Robert Plant for the song "Big Log"), down Route 190, the first scenic bit of scenery you come upon is Zabriskie Point.  This is definitely a landscape worthy of the title "other worldly":

A lot of Death Valley is flat valley, well below sea level.  Zabriskie Point is not flat and it's in the part of the park before the road surface slips below sea level.

It's been quite some time since my last trip to Death Valley, at least more than 10 years.  The Zabriskie Point area has been modernized and upgraded, with a small walkway to the viewpoint (and the least stinky outhouses I've ever smelled) (sorry for the TMI, but it's true).

 

Here is the group of us day tourists touring Death Valley on our own Death Valley Day:

From left to right:  Me.  My sister's college friend's husband.  My sister's college friend.  Those two now live in Ohio barely over the Beaver County line.  My sister.  My brother-in-law.  No names given because not everybody likes to have his or her name plastered all over the internets.  And, besides, maybe one of those people (such as, for example, me) told people they were somewhere else and that person would be revealed to be a liar if photographic proof were available on the internet that the person was instead in Death Valley.  I don't want that on my conscience.  So everyone's nameless of the Spretnak Vacation Blog.  Except the original blogging Spretnak.

The next stop was the Furnace Creek Inn.  Aren't the grounds unexpectedly green?

The Inn was built over an underground spring, so the water is locally supplied by nature and geology.  We stopped here to pay the national park admission and to eat lunch.  Turns out, because of the government shutdown, they weren't charging an entry fee.  Besides, we were all "seniors" old enough to be eligible for the lifetime national park passes, which two in the group had.  But they were charging for lunch.

Here is the historic marker marking that we are in Death Valley.

This is where we were going to make the turn to go to Badwater Basin,  At 282 feet below sea level, it is the lowest point on land in North America.  The road to Badwater Basin, unfortunately was closed.  Apparently this was due to recent flash flooding and not the government shutdown.  And Badwater Basin being 13 miles or so down the road, was too far to walk in the scorching hot Death Valley sun.  And none of us in our group wanted to become part of the history of how Death Valley got its name.

So off to the Harmony Borax Works:

Borax built Death Valley.  Borax is a mineral salt that, until the widespread use of chlorine bleach, was used as a clothing whitener.  If you in the second half of what actuarial tables would deem to be a full life, surely you remember 20-Mule Team Borax as a detergent additive for when your mothers did laundry (and back in those days only mothers did laundry because that's the way the world was back then -- only three channels on the TV and only mothers doing laundry).

They actually processed the borax ore here to get the pure white borax powder because shipping the borax otherwise would have been too expensive.  Even using a railroad and not a team of 20 mules.

And here I am posing for photo, looking just like the Chinese immigrant labor pressed into service at this borax mill at starvation wages.

After that it was off to the air-conditioned visitor center where I bought a souvenir refrigerator magnet.  And, just like that, our Death Valley Day was over.

Weekend Getaway to the City That Everyone (But Me) Loves: San Diego

Photo in front of a fountain. Because you always pose for photos in front of fountains.

I'm a little late and slow posting this, but I recently took a weekend trip to Everyone's Favorite City(TM), everyone but me that is: San Diego, California USA.

I went for an overnight trip even though I was completely inundated with work in what is supposed to be the wind-down phase of my career. I went for one purpose and one purpose only. Well, two purposes. To meet up with two Georgia Tech friends, one of whom I have not seen since the early to mid 1980s, before she became a superstar bio-engineering professor and certified genius, the other being someone I had not seen since in maybe close to 10 years, before the covidiocy struck America.

Pictured above is me with my friend who I had not seen in decades. She was in town for a professional conference which included, naturally, the bestowing upon of her of some prestigious (within her field) award. We only had a limited time since the Professor had a full schedule of conference events. So when I hit town Saturday, off we went to Balboa Park.

Just me this time. Only in this photo I have legs.
In case anyone was wondering if I brought them along this trip. Which I did. As you can see.

Afterwards we met up with another Georgia Tech friend who lives in "North County," as the people "in the know" call the northern part of San Diego County. We did dinner in a brew pub in the northern part of downtown San Diego, in a neighborhood that probably was sufficiently cool as to have its own name. I can't recall what the name was. We did not want to eat and drink in the Gaslight District, where the Professor's conference/convention was because, due to the combination of infrequent rain and a large population of people living on the streets, smelled of human waste. Hey. Just keeping it real.

The brew pub and the streets around it were filled with those good-looking people for which San Diego is known. I'm sure any bar in the Gaslight District would have been equally filled the young and beautiful -- a crowd in which I fit in perfectly. Yes, I know "technically" it's called the Gaslamp District, but we all kept wanting to call it the Gaslight District since gaslighting seems to be more frequent nowadays than gaslamping.

I have no pictures of dinner and drinking because none of the three of us live our lives on social media so we kinda forget to get a group photo. We were too busy have a fun conversation catching upon our respective lives to secure photograph proof of our meet-up. We're those kind of people. But at least I got a few photos of me at a fountain in Balboa Park.

Phot-o' the Day: Yosemite on a Dry Autumn Day; Yosemite National Park, California USA

If you go to Yosemite National Park, don't make the mistake I made. Do not go in the fall, when the weather is warm and dry. Go in the spring, preferably after a wet winter. Why?

You need water to make a waterfall. You can see the barest glimmer of a waterfall plunging over this cliffside. I am guessing from the discoloration of the surrounding rock that the dark color is the maximum water flow in the wettest years. That's a whole lot more water than the tiny trickle visible in this shot.

At least in the fall, on a weekday, after the school year has long started (back in the pre-COVID days when children would physically attend schools in actual live person), Yosemite was relatively empty. Still, Yosemite without waterfalls is like Yellowstone without geysers. Or Rocky Mountain National Park in the plains. Something important is missing.

Visited September 2002. Before the advent of digital photography (in my life, at least).

Zagreb, Croatia: Glavni Kolodvor and Leaving Croatia

Glavni Kolodvor! The train station. Riding the late afternoon train to Budapest.

Thursday, May 6, was Day 9 of this trip. And I just realized that I have been in transit for seven of the nine days. This has been a road trip, whether by plane, van, car, or, now, train. I've seen a lot of territory. I've met a lot of people. And I think I've learned a lot about Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia. But I'm ready for a few days of stay-put.

First, of all about the train:

No. It's not that old of a locomotive that will be pulling me to Hungary. But it might as well be! (Note also that the train appears to have white walls! How cool is that? Way cool!)

We hear stories in the states about the marvels of European rail travel. Bullet trains and other high speed rail barreling through the countryside at a couple hundred miles an hour. Maybe in Old Europe, but not in the countries once behind the iron curtain. It was a seven-hour train trip Zagreb to Budapest. By car, it would be three. By air, it would be even faster, but obscenely expensive ($370 versus a $50 train ticket -- no-brainer territory even if I wasn't a cheapskate.) And, you know how Europeans supposedly love to travel by train? There was hardly anyone taking the 15:45 to Budapest.

One last look at Zagreb:

The train platform at Glavni Kolodvor. Hustle and bustle is sporadic, but mostly limited to the local platforms. The international platform is church-mouse quiet.

This will conclude the Croatia portion of our programming. From here on out, it will be all Budapest, all Hungary. I loved my first visit to Croatia, but here's a travel tip and you don't even need to buy a travel book for it. You know how back during the Dubrovnik posts I marveled at how much Croatia looked like California? It's a lot like California in another respect: The closer you are to the coast, the better the time you will have.

Next Croatia trip I will definitely hit Plitvice Lakes, which is inland. It's the one place that everyone I've talked to -- and I mean the English-speaking locals -- when I tell them this was my first visit, they all asked if I went to, or was going to go to, Plitvice. That tells me I made a tactical error in skipping that site. But other than that, the next time I am in Croatia -- and I do hope there's a next time -- I'm hugging the coast.

Zagreb's not a bad place. But one morning is all the Zagreb I will ever need. But even little rocky/brown Pag: one day was not enough. Istria, Zadar, Split, the islands of the Kvarner, the islands of Southern Dalmatia: all would be worth a visit.