Friday 27th March

Started the day with a $0.99 breakfast at the casino, exploiting the exploiters yet again. We got on the 88 heading east, our route over the Sierra Nevada mountain range. In fact, it was the most southerly route that had been plowed. The road was beautiful, passing through snowy forest landscapes. We tried to take a short cut to the 395, but got confused reading the signs about which roads were closed, and had to turn back and take a different route which dipped into Nevada. The gambling machines in the petrol station helped us to realise that we had crossed the state line. Onto the 395, we planned to visit a mining ghost town called Bodie, but the road to that was also closed. We then took a turning for Lundy Lake which was supposed to be a beautiful spot in the springtime, but were not surprised in the least to find that a little way down, the road had been closed.
We passed Lake Mono which was pretty spectacular from our high vantage point. The land was beginning to turn pretty desert-like. Before long we had the White Mountains on our eastern flank and the Sierras on the west, the canyon road that Gary had talked about. We picked the town of Lone Pine as our place to spend the night, just west of the Death Valley entrance via the 136. Before we arrived there, we passed the Manzanar National Historic Site, a place where 10,000 Japanese Americans had been placed after the attack on Pearl Harbour. This was something I had never heard about. It may not quite have been a concentration camp, but still quite a shocking affront to the freedoms of American citizens. About the only part of it still standing is a stark watchtower; most of the site was destroyed.
Lone Pine was a nice enough place, a lot of Westerns had been filmed around here so that was heavily played upon. You almost feel like you’re in an Old West town being there, until you look a bit closer and realise how much of it has been styled for tourists. We stayed in a place called the Dow Hotel, which had cheaper rooms than the Dow Motel for some reason. We went for a drink in a bar called Jake’s, which was ok but did not seem as friendly as some we had been in. It was completely covered with Western film memorabilia. We ate at a place called The Mount Whitney Restaurant, serving buffalo, venison, elk and ostrich burgers! Greg went for the buffalo and I the elk, both very good. We then visited the other bar in town, the Double L. This was the least comfortable I had felt in any bar so far, it felt like it was very much a locals place. Nothing bad happened, we just didn’t feel very welcome there. We drank our fastest pint so far, then got an early night in preparation for Death Valley.