Spongebob Rules

Billy Connolly once described taking his two girls on a journey back to his roots in Scotland, trailing around the places of his childhood and telling them stories of his life there, immersing them in the history, the music, the culture of the place.

Asked upon their return home to America what impressed them most about this odyssey they both replied 'Sesame Street on the hotel TV'.

Why am I telling you this ?
Spongebob Squarepants. Say no more.

Hot desert night

I'm sitting outside the General Store at Furnace Creek Ranch in Death Valley. It's just after 9 at night, the temperature is 36 degrees, the stars are bright and the crickets loud. An awe-inspiring place; we've spent the day visiting the huge dunes north of here, the salt flat at the lowest point in America (84m below sea level) and watching the sun set over Death Valley from a high ridge. At the hottest part of the day we experienced 44 degrees, beating my previous record of 42 degrees in Sydney in 1979 ! Simon has been taking his new camera for a serious test run, and something over 120 photos await viewing and editing. We were winners in Las Vegas, scoring Simon's camera for a bargain price and having the cheapest meal out so far.

Lots of photos of mine for uploading but it may have to wait a few days as we're out of interweb range for the next day or two.

Driving to Las Vegas

It's what I imagined but bigger. Driving away from Los Angeles was like one of those perspective things on the interweb where you start with a quark and pull back until you see the whole leaf, then the tree and the town and the continent and the planet and you keep going until you are Zaphod Beeblebrox or some such. Anyway, LA is vast and all-encompassing until you see the desert beyond. We drove four and a half hours through a brown rock-strewn moonscape punctuated with water towers, abandoned trailer parks, a prison and tiny settlements, broken signs on high gantries advertising long forgotten venues and events, the occasional fenced compound housing assorted trucks, sheds, shacks and old cars. It could have been another Disney creation for all that I was able to connect with the scale and reality of it.
We talked in the car about all those people who inched across this shimmering dustbowl in carts, looking for a better life; what we will endure to find what we want, to find a home worthy of us. What a privilege to sit in our (huge) refrigerated steel ship listening to the Eagles (sorry, but what else ?) and glide along our smooth desert corridor. A rich experience, I loved it; the incredible scale of the desert, the album-cover Joshua trees, the dead-straight roads, the expressions of awe from the kids as each new sight rolled past.
After 200-odd miles of this there was a road sign: Las Vegas 63 miles, Salt Lake City 560 miles. I thought about it, but only briefly.