Category: Awesome!

We spent a few days driving across the desert from California, through Nevada and into Utah. Along the way, we spent the night in Hawthorne, Nevada. While in Hawthorne, we toured the town’s main attraction, the Hawthorne Ordnance Museum. 

From Hawthorne, we traveled east through the desert to Elko, Nevada where we spent the night. The next morning, we drove another two hours east of Elko to arrive at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.

The massive Bonneville Salt Flats stretched to the horizon. The occasional mountain ridge in the distance provided some sense of scale in an otherwise featureless terrain. We spent a couple of hours driving around the salt flats and taking in the views. We even let the kids take a turn at the wheel since there was no one around for miles. 

We departed from Bakersfield, California in the morning and headed north to spend the day exploring Sequoia National Park and Kings Canyon National Park. The main attraction in these two parks are the massive Sequoia trees dotting the rugged mountainous terrain. The star, the General Sherman Tree, lived up to its claim of being the largest tree in the world. 

After leaving Sequoia/Kings Canyon, we headed back down the mountain to Fresno, California where we enjoyed a couple of days of mostly peaceful rest and relaxation (drive by shooting notwithstanding). 

Then we headed back up the mountain to visit Yosemite National Park. The interior of the park proved hectic and overcrowded. But once we escaped to the lesser visited parts of the park, we got to appreciate the natural beauty that Yosemite is known for. We enjoyed a tranquil lakeside picnic dinner along the Tioga Mountain Pass Road before heading back down the east side of the mountain into the desert flatlands of Nevada.