And We Thought Texas Was Hot!

A Oasis RV Resort, Las Vegas, Nevada...

Okay, maybe this wasn't a good idea--going to Sequoia and Kings Canyon, that is. The reason? Well, the only way you can get to Texas from there, if you don't want to do a lot of backtracking, is to bite the bullet and go through some really hot landscape from southern California to Nevada. And that's what we did today. Let me just go ahead and get this out of the way: Driving from Bakersfield to Las Vegas in August in a motorhome is just plain dumb!

Thankfully, Tiffin did a good job with the dash a/c in Phannie, as we have six nozzles blowing good cold air--four of them on Sandy, as it should be in this, ah, time of her life. This is almost always plenty of air conditioning for us without firing up the generator and running the roof airs. Until today.

We did pretty well until reaching Barstow, a town that will surely serve as Satan's headquarters some day, as it could only have been conceived in some hellish hot place in which he would be comfortable. When we opened the door and stepped onto the parking lot pavement at a local burger joint, we were instantly hit by a wind so hot that it must have come from a convection oven. It was almost impossible to breathe as we gasped for air, not really caring about food any longer. It was easily the hottest place we have ever been.

The air conditioning in the café couldn't possibly keep up with the  furnace outside, so I tried to pick a table underneath a ceiling fan, which was also quite inadequate. We didn't much care for the burgers, so we scurried back to Phannie and started her up quickly. We had left a couple of roof airs running when we went to the restaurant, and we didn't bother to turn them off for the rest of the trip.

It was just as we passed the south end of Death Valley that the outside air temperature gauge reached 121 degrees. I-15 was quite busy during this leg, and we saw a number of trucks that had just given up on the side of the road near the long inclines leading east from Bakersfield. Fortunately, we were unfazed by the heat, as Phannie's cabin was almost chilly with the dash air and both forward roof airs going. During part of the trip today, we were on the phone whining to friends about the heat, only to get precious little sympathy, given the number of posts we made from the Rocky Mountains and Alaska reveling in our cool surroundings there. Having no one to commiserate with us made our plight even worse, but I guess I understood.

We reached Las Vegas without incident, thankfully, after some 240 miles of some really unattractive landscape. Just to be clear, we're pretty sure we won't be doing that route again in the middle of summer or maybe--ever.

Oasis is a very large and nice RV park in Las Vegas, and we plan to stay here for a couple more days. As a bonus, it's also a Passport America park, for which we pay half price for three days. It's nice enough, in fact, to put it on my "best of the best" list.

Thank you, Lord, for this wonderful life; please forgive me if I don't appreciate it enough each day.