Item From an Old Zip Disk

May 19, 2001

Death Valley Day. Our rental car for the trip was a maroon ’01 Oldsmobile. I figured I would take that one, since they aren’t going make them any more. It served us well. We didn’t leave for Death Valley right away, however, since other matters needed our attention — sleeping late, eating a large breakfast, going to the Aladdin pool.

Breakfast was at an off-Strip casino that I’d read about, Arizona Charlie’s. Now that was a Las Vegas breakfast. Everything on the Strip is a profit center. Elsewhere, loss-leader food is still offered, and the ham & eggs & hash browns & biscuit & tea I had was about $4, and tasty too.

We headed north in the early afternoon, a wise decision as it turned out, since by the time we were in the thick of Death Valley, the sun was going down, and temps were only in the 90s. Even so, that’s hot enough, and the trip was mostly driving, but fine driving, the kind with few cars and scenic mountains and flats.

The best part by far was the “Artist’s Drive,” a few miles of road near the park headquarters at Furnace Creek. Time had colored the cliff walls masterfully, and on that road the cliff walls weren’t far away — it snakes up and down and within a few feet of the rocks. We also spent a few minutes at the side of the road at Badwater, which is reportedly the lowest point to which you can drive in the Western Hemisphere, and only two feet higher than the nadir of the hemisphere, out on the salt flat where only the foolish roam in May. If you look carefully, you can see on a mountainside near Badwater a sign 220 feet up that says “sea level.”