Not a car in sight, just empty dessert, with weird looking trees. A road that you could look onto the next little rise and see it just curving up the hill. As we drove our surroundings changed around us. At first it was shrubs and rocks and weird cactus looking trees. Then is was charcoal black hills and crevices that dropped hundreds of feet below, and then it was sand like ground, with no rocks or trees. And now all that I saw was brown dirt and green little shrubs, and large grey rocks. Looking out the back window you could just barely see the tips of the mountains that we had just crossed over yesterday. But over time even those faded away and became a blur with the sky. In the almost 100 degree weather the Rv was starting to complain with us again. Almost as if it was saying “This again??”
The road was going downhill now, in between two dry banks. There were signs warning us about rock slides. The more exciting signs though were the elevation signs. Yesterday we almost broke 10,000 elevation and today we were going to be breaking 0. Soon the Rv would be under sea level. A sign appeared a ways down the road, and as the road ran under the wheels I finally could read it. -100 elevation. Kim pulled off the road at the next stop, just to see what negative elevation felt like. When I opened the door I was blasted with burning hot air. While we were driving we had the Ac on just to keep the motor home livable. I had figured the outside would be hot, but this? This felt like an oven.
Just in the couple minutes I was outside I began to sweat. So being me I had a great idea. ‘Why don't we run up to vista point?’ Kim and Daniel joined me and the three of us jogged up a path just to the top of a little hill. The view was so mesmerizing. When I looked over the edge, the ground was at least 50 feet below. The ground kind of looked like sand dunes, except they were brown, the ground would drop maybe 100 feet and then rise up again to a point higher than I was. After taking some pictures and just taking in the hundreds of miles of dessert that I could see, I started back down. Nearing the bottom, the heat caught up to me, and even though I had drank a full bottle of water before leaving I began to feel light headed. When I entered the Rv again it no longer felt hot, compared to the outside it was like a freezer.
Death Valley was now in the past, and Vegas was in the future. The Vegas strip was only 20 minutes away. I wasn’t sure if we would be able to find parking anywhere near it but we could try. As we were entering Vegas, the Strip began to come into view, Casino’s and lodges for blocks. We were able to find parking, quite a bit of it actually. When I stepped out of the Rv I was surprised with how hot Vegas was. I put on some lighter clothing and we all headed out into the oven they call Vegas. We began walking down the strip, and within a block of walking the heat was beating down on all of us.
We evacuated of the sidewalk and into one of the tall lodges. The air inside was pure and cold. I walked through the lodge and then out the other door, burning hot air once again. I was hungry so I rallied all of my family to head over to a mall across the street and get some food. We ate, and then we walked, in cold buildings and then outside again. We walked through casinos, and up and down escalators. We walked for at least a mile down the strip, and then we walked back. Vegas had been hot, but it made us all excited to get to Zion where the air was colder. So off we went toward Zion.
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