Today was the day of unnecessary delays. It began okay, we had a good night in the cabin and left after a quick breakfast to the Joshua Tree National Park. Unfortunately right after we got there we had to leave again because Marco realised that he had accidentally taken the keys of the cabin with him. We braught the keys back which cost us about an hour. Back at the park we finally started exploring it. It was a great experience, lots of these weird looking but beautiful Joshua Trees (remember the U2 album?!), several hiking trails and camping grounds. We didn't go hiking, it was simply too hot. Instead we took several shorter stops to explore different sections of the park and take pictures. We saw a roadrunner (and even a whole roadrunner family!) and several other small animals (again no rattlesnakes, phew!).
There was roadwork in the park and they only allowed the cars to pass the road in one direction at a time. There was a guy who did nothing but holding a stop sign until the pilot car was ready to lead the other cars through the park. If I ever decide to move to the Mojave area, I'd become a stop sign holder so I'd pretty much have nothing to do all day.
To leave the park we took a dirt path which was suggested to us by our navigation system. At first the path wasn't a problem and even when we reached a section where it was pretty sandy and we saw other people who got stuck there, our car did well. It only got difficult when we reached a section where the road went up a mountain and got extremely steep and uneven with lots of big rocks. We tried it at first but had to give up eventually as the risk of getting stuck was too high. We were at least 15 or 20 miles away from civilisation and apart from one car at the beginning of the path we didn't see anyone. The thought of spending the night in the desert all night without phone reception wasn't very appealing... That of course meant that we had to go back all the way and had to take a different route to Las Vegas, our next destination.
The detours had cost us at least two hours if not more and we still had about 350 kilometers ahead of us at a time we had planned for our arrival in Las Vegas. The route was nothing like we had ever seen, we were literally in the middle of nowhere. At one point the street went totally straight ahead for 100 kilometres (with lots of funny dips though that made our stomachs jump) and there was nothing around us, no towns, not even a gas station, only nature. And it got hotter and hotter the closer we got to Las Vegas, we had to have the air condition in our car running all the time (which on a funny note gave me icy cold feet). The view was spectacular most of the time and we made several foto stops. The landscape looked rather like Australia than the US (though I've never been there and only can compare it from fotos).
It became immediately clear when we had left California and entered Nevada because suddenly there were casinos everywhere. We made it to Las Vegas after a very long ride (and a long day in general with lots of hours spent in the car) at 11 pm and directly went to bed. It was still 32 degree Celsius warm at almost midnight but thankfully our place had air condition.
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