Day 4: Night of the Bugs

When we checked into our motel yesterday, there was a bug (cricket, cockroach?) on the wall in our room. I killed it. Then, when we went to bed, one started making noise - sounded like a cricket - and I got up and killed two more, but the noise continued, and we finally went to sleep. At one o'clock AM, I got up and killed two more, including the one that was making the racket. In the morning, after I showered, I found another on the bed (!). Did not tell Jackie about that one until hours later, when we were on the road. I took the bodies of six bugs up to the front desk, but the guy did not care, said it happens in August. Super 8 will hear about this. $100 a night is not a lot for a room these days, but it's too much for one that is infested with bugs.

Our first stop was Death Valley. We parked at an overlook next to a canyon nicknamed Star Wars Canyon, because they train military jet pilots there to fly through the canyon at high speeds and low altitude. That sounded pretty cool, and then we saw a couple of jets going out for a flight, and they flew low and out of our sight. So we waited for maybe 10 minutes, hoping they were going to fly right past us, but I guess they had other plans, so no luck.

When we got to the main part of the park, the ranger warned us to get out of the area before the rains come. They are expecting two inches of rain - a year's worth for Death Valley - in the next two days, and that will mean epic flooding. The place is a built a bit like a bowl, with Death Valley at the bottom of the bowl, and all that water is going to flow towards the valley.

We visited Furnace Creek in Death Valley, the hottest place on earth, and Badwater, the lowest place in North America at negative 282 feet, and drove on a loop called Artist's Drive. You can see that the temperature, according to the car, reached 115, but actually it got up to 120 for a few minutes. I got out of the car at Badwater and walked a short way; that kind of heat feels like standing next to a big fire, so we didn't spend much time outside the car.

As we approached Kingman, Arizona, we ran into thunderstorms with lots of lightning, torrential rains, and very high winds. Our phones lit up with flash flood warnings a couple of times. The storms were still going as we sat in our room last night, but this morning the rain has stopped, and weather for Albuquerque shows clear and only 95 degrees, so all is well.