Bishop, California

Good afternoon, my friends. As you can see from the title of this post, we've moved on from Death Valley. We left a day earlier than we'd planned. It was too darned hot there, and without electricity, we couldn't run our air-conditioner. We enjoyed seeing the wildflowers, and that was our reason for going. Having seen them, we decided to move along. We're heading for home now, taking four nights to get there. 

So, let's talk about our last day in Death Valley, shall we? We left our campsite and drove the short distance to Badwater Drive. In this first image, I captured the sign indicating we were at sea level.

And, wow! We've witnessed one other superbloom in Death Valley, but nothing like this one. The real stars of the show (for now) were the Desert Sunflowers. I would anticipate seeing different flower in a week or two.

The were blooming in vast fields on both sides of the road.

Here, we could see telescope peak and the salt flat there in the middle. At the bottom of the image, more desert sunflowers.

They were growing all along the roadsides.

The supporting cast of flowers was led by the phacelia.

They were growing in big clusters.

And in huge swaths, especially in the washes.

Also of note, we've never seen this much water in Badwater Basin. Usually, there's a small puddle in this vicinity, but the water stretched from the park boundary all the way to Furnace Creek where we were camped...a distance of about 30 miles.

Remember where we were at sea level? Here's where we are now. The red arrow marks the sign indicating sea level in this next image.

We turned around there and headed back, enjoying more fields of sunflowers.

We took the side road of Artists Drive. This is one of the more colorful  places in the park.

It's noteworthy for its large green patches, but there are lots of colors here.

The road dips and curves around. There's a length limit here of 25 feet.

Here's some more of the green.

Coming to the end of the drive, we were still enjoying the variation in colors of the landscape.

Here was another wash filled with phacelia.

Getting back to the main road...

I never get tired of this colorful range.

Other flowers we saw...these were eensy weensy flowers. My phone identifies them as narrow-leaved cryptantha.

My phone identifies these as nama demissa. The flowers were about the size of a dime.

And, of course, the desert chicory.

From there, we headed back to the RV and tried to stay cool. It wasn't too bad sitting outside in the shade. I used an ice pack under my shirt to help cool me off. Later in the evening, we headed over to The Inn at Death Valley for drinks and a light meal. One must pass through this tunnel to reach the elevator to the third floor.

There, we enjoyed prickly pear margaritas and a light dinner.

While we ate, we enjoyed the setting sun.

And while there, we decided to leave Death Valley this morning. We'd seen what we came to see, and we didn't feel like suffering through another hot night without air-conditioning. Besides, the kitties were turning into tiger butter.

So we left Death Valley early this morning, and now find ourselves in Bishop, California. We expect to arrive home by Thursday. We'll spend tomorrow night in Reno, and the continue from there. I'll tell you about today's drive in tomorrow's post.