As you can see from the title of this journal entry, after Yosemite we found ourselves in some pretty 'off the beaten track' type places...I bet none of you can remember me reeling off the places I was going to be visiting as "LA, San Diego, San Francisco, Oakhurst, Lee Vining...Las Vegas, Death Valley blah blah blah", can you? We were so naive! I think we really thought we were going to only stay in places we'd heard of the whole time! Well...now I have seen the places listed above too. And very exciting they were too.

We ended up in Oakhurst as it was the first place we hit when we emerged from Yosemite (in the dark.) As they had no Motel 6 we had to upgrade to a Comfort Inn. We have never known such luxury! Well, they had an iron and ironing board in the room anyway. We were knackered after all the fresh air of the park and so ordered pizza in - can't remember the name of the restaurant, but their slogan is embedded in my mind forever...'We toss 'em, they're awesome!'. Genius, no?

The following morning we planned to travel back through the park and out the other side. I can't even remember where we were headed to be honest, but the weather changed our route for us. It was hammering down and when we got to the entrance of the park we were turned away. They'd closed the roads in case there was a storm (and frankly it did look likely), so I guess it was a good job we hadn't been 20 minutes earlier or we would've been on a dodgy cliffside road when it all kicked off.

As a contingency measure we drove four and a half hours to Sacramento, California's state capital and part-time home to Arnold 'the Governator' Schwarzenegger. Truly a dull town. But they do have a Motel 6.

From Sacramento we headed to Lee Vining near Mono Lake. To be honest, I think we chose it because there was something of note on the map (ie, the lake) and so it stood out. All these towns were (I guess still are) at really high altitude and so were really cold, so we were still wearing a lot of clothes! We drove through some amazing scenery (I got very trigger happy so you will see many photos) and the storm clouds only added to it. When we rocked up in Lee Vining we were confident that although it was a small place we wouldn't have any difficulty finding somewhere to stay (we'd never heard of the place after all, so how many people could actually need a motel room there?!) The illuminated 'No vacancy' signs on both sides of the road (the only road) told us otherwise however, so we went to ask the advice of the girl in the visitor centre who suggested that the promisingly named 'Lee Vining Motel' didn't take reservations and didn't open for another half an hour (at 4pm for some reason), but might be worth a try. It was actually 5pm by the time a little woman emerged from a house over the road and (thankfully) told us that she had a room available...good job, as I think the next town along was about another hour's drive! We decided we should go and have a look at the lake despite the weather - it has these things in it called 'tufas' in it. I think they're just big weird looking rocks, but the angry man in the visitor centre shouted at us that they were closed, so I won't be giving you any more indepth explanation than that! In the evening we ate at the Rough Guide-recommended 'Woah Nellie Deli' - I had their "world-famous" (lots of 'world-famous' stuff in this area that I've never heard of, think maybe I'm just very ignorant!) jambalaya. It was delicious! The restaurant/cafe is very lively, and strangely located in a petrol station. More atmospheric than it sounds...promise.

The following morning we got up early as we wanted to go and see Bodie Ghost Town. They have quite a lot of these ghost town things here. They're generally towns that were set up at varying different times in the (in the bigger scale of things) not too distant past and then abandoned when the surrounding land had been drained of all it was worth. Bodie had a gold mine. It was a thriving town but it looks like suddenly everyone decided they wanted to go somewhere else and there was a mass exodus. Some of them appear to have been mid-meal...It was a seriously strange place, not made any less strange by the snow! I was bl88dy freezing and so after I'd looked at about 20 empty houses I was fairly miserable, but Em found it fascinating. Anyone who knows me well knows that when my fingers turn blue, it tends to be game over...so like a sulking child I went and sat in the car with the heaters on while Emily did the final bits.

Anyway, I was eager to get on - we were headed for Death Valley! x