jay | Through the desert in a van with no name

Heading south from Reno today, we followed US395 back into California.

There were many great exposures... faults, slickensides, crumbling lava, rhyolite, upthrust sedimentary layers, cinder cones, pumice slopes... distant mountaintop glaciers. It was beautiful...

patgreene drove all day, letting me look. I thought of

mactavish several times, wishing I could discuss some of these features with her...

By lunch, we'd arrived in Bodie, a former mining town that once had 10K inhabitants but closed in the 1940s. It is in a state of "arrested decay" , preserved from destruction but not cleaned-up or Disney-fied. Table settings and schoolbooks are left as they were abandoned in 1942.

This shows us standing in front of the former dry-goods and general store.

patgreene and I loved it, James was interested, but the two younger kids became bored and grumpy after a couple of hours.

Then we drove a few miles south and stopped again at Mono Lake, where Pat and I had visited in July. David can now explain how the tufa towers form, and that the alkali flies can swim (!).

This photo shows

patgreene and David on the self-guided interpretative trail.

The kids are learning new concepts, facts, and ideas... and I'm enjoying myself. Although one drawback is that with everyone crowded into one hotel room, there's no room for any romantic interludes with Pat. A bit frustrating, but it can wait.