If you are going to California, then do yourself a favor – stay away from big cities, if where the southern state and conquer you, so where there is no one. Not knowing how best to leave the city, which stretches for two hours in any direction, I chose the route north to the Sequoia and Yosemite National Parks, and back through Death Valley and Route 66.
We will talk about the parks and deserts separately, now I would like to share my impressions of the road itself. And we have rolled through California for no less than 2000 miles in 10 days. Distances here are very deceptive.
In California, alternative energy sources are very developed – it is not in vain that Schwarz is holding onto solar panels on promotional posters. I have never seen such vast wind farms as here.
At the same time, I have never seen such enthusiasm for firearms anywhere else. Just like that, from the billboard on the road you will be offered to buy a pistol or a rifle. A gun in every house, so to speak.
Social advertising is a little less catchy than gun advertising, but with creativity, with rhyme. Something like “Buckle up or “unbuckle”.
Countless urban-type settlements sneak out of the window, little different from each other.
But as soon as you turn away from the interstate highway, they give way to simply stunning unspoiled desert landscapes.
Asphalt – as if only yesterday postelennye. And, unlike large highways, the roadsides are not dotted with car wrecks and shreds of torn tires. It’s just a fairy tale and not a road.
Why didn’t I have a question whether to write a separate post about the road – it’s because here it’s not a frame taken overtly in the window on the move – the photo wallpaper on the desktop.
Most of all on the road, I fell in love with the wonderful prickly trees – Yucca tree.
Which is especially numerous in the area of the Joshua Tree National Park and the Mojave Desert.
If it were my will, I would become a tent under one of them and take it off at dawn and dusk, at night against a starry sky and at bright midday – Yucca trees are just unusually textured. But here in California are such distances that one has to move forward to reach civilization. So here you have everything in one picture at once.
The California desert can be blamed for anything but monotony.
These wastelands originate in the south of Canada, near Osoyus in the only Canadian desert Nk Mip, and stretch south through the whole country to Mexico and further.
But only here, in the South of the USA, the desert heat reaches really stunning heights.
As you can see on the largest thermometer in the world in the town of Baker, the temperature outside the air-conditioned Corolla window is 45°C (113°F).
The fate of the 41-meter thermometer is very difficult because it was built, in general, nowhere – a town between the Mojave Desert and Death Valley, with a population of only 735 people, lives solely at the expense of passers-by on the 15 th Highway from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. The attraction for the local restaurant “Bun Boy” cost $700,000 in 1991 – you may remember from American films how it is fashionable to have the biggest rope roll or the biggest apple in every roadside city, well, the biggest thermometer. A thermometer costs $8,000 a month to operate – no wonder it was turned off when the economic crisis hit in 2008. So when Top Gear came here in 2012 (s19e02), it didn’t work in their show. In 2013, the thermometer and a souvenir store were put up for sale and only in 2014 did the new owner turn on the local landmark again.
In general, if you want classic desert landscapes with a straight as a string expensive going into the horizon – you go east on Route 66.
The Valley of Death, by the way, turned out to be unexpectedly relief – with several valleys at or below sea level and ridges up to one and a half kilometers high, where you have to climb or descend from them.
At the passes, the road turns straight as a string into serpentine mountains.
And if you want heavy clouds with lightning over mountain peaks and hundred-meter sequoia, then you should go north towards Yosemite National Park.
And if you want heavy clouds above the mountain peaks, then you should go north towards Yosemite National Park.
The main thing is to make sure that there is always at least half a tank of gas, because gas stations are not found everywhere. However, you are warned about it – the main thing is not to miss it.
Death Valley. Next fuelling – in 57 miles
Once the sign was even useful to me to go back to the last gas station and not to worry later on the road and not to refuse the desire to check what the car is capable of on an empty road.
Music Road
In the town of Lancaster (CA) on a quarter-mile stretch with grooves in the asphalt is recorded overture by William Tell. I also learned about it from the same Top Gere episode.
To be more exact, it has been written down only a month in the autumn of 2008 while there were no complaints about noise from local residents, then the road was rolled up with new asphalt. Then began to receive new complaints from local residents, now that it was removed – and it opened again, this time in two kilometers from the nearest houses.
Only the designers of the new road set up in the calculations and the intervals between the notes of the overture were too far from each other, so the set speed limit of 90km / h (55mph) melody is difficult to recognize. Only being accelerated twice, the melody is more or less similar to the famous overture (check if you recognize it in the second part of the video).
Music road on the map
Yes, and when you go on a trip to California, don’t forget to bring the little things for provoking souvenirs to your friends, which you can buy right here in the toilet at the gas station.