6/17/17 California, Death Valley NP

We changed our plans again. Easy to do when you don't have an itinerary. 

We decided not to go snowboarding. We had a couple reasons leading up to it and then ultimately it boiled down to my amateur status on the board and the fact that there's limited slopes open and not many easy-ish slopes open for me to warm up on 😒. We decided to put the money towards something else fun we might do down the road. 

We had a beautiful drive along the highway to get to Death Valley NP. We passed along the backside of kings canyon NP and sequoia but there's no roads leading in from this route. 

Drove into the desert and into Death Valley national park. We had no idea what we were in for. I really didn't do much research on this park...oops. Guess I should've known from the name. 

The heat was tolerable outside the park so we thought nothing of it. Turns out it's extremely hot. In fact, it's one of the hottest places on earth. And unfortunately our truck's AC isn't working.

It did have its own kind of beauty. 

The picture below shows the road we took through Death Valley NP. It was 200' below sea level at the bottom. 

Pretty soon we were sweating and HOT and miserable. We survived and drove into Pahrump, shortly outside the park in Nevada. We took turns going into Walmart to escape the heat and ran the AC in the truck camper for a little break for Maya.

We were hot and exhausted and not sure where to drive as we were tired of driving in the heat. Thankfully as we were driving through town we found an RV resort for only $25/night. It has full hook ups, wifi, laundry, pool, casino, buffet, showers, everything you need and is actually really nice and well kept. Not our typical secluded spot but we were so happy for it. We haven't done any sites with hook ups this trip and haven't even stayed in a campground since Mt. Rainier, which we only did because we were headed to Seattle after. It was nice to blast the AC And take a nice long shower. 

So we looked up what the temp was today and this is what we found:

Real feel: 125 degrees. Take note that we were 1 degree away from the record. With no AC. No wonder it was so hot!