Mono Lake and Bodie

We decided to go see a ghost town!

First we passed through Yosemite (again).

On the other side of Yosemite is a small town called Lee Vining. They have a Mobil restaurant!

We did not eat there.

We were intending on finding a motel or something in this town, but it turns out that Labor Day weekend is a pretty popular time for tourism! So we were out of luck: no vacancies at all in any respectable search radius.

So we went back towards Yosemite, snuck into an unoccupied campsite, and slept in the car. We hadn't brought sleeping bags or blankets or anything, but we reclined the seats and put on our jackets and managed to get some sleep.

I turned on the car in the middle of the night to try to get some heat but the diesel engine takes forever to warm up and I gave up before we got any real warm air.

We woke with the sun, but Bodie didn't open until 9, so we went down to Mono Lake and looked at the gulls.

CAR HITS/HIT BY SWALLOW

As we drove along, bursts of small birds would erupt from roadside bushes as we passed them, with an odd but unmistakeable preference for flying into the road. Once one of these birds crossed paths with our car and that was not good for the bird.

We stopped at the Mono Lake County Park. They'd built a boardwalk out to the edge of the lake  [photo at top of page], and there were several tufa towers there as well.

Okay, that's enough narration; I am going to just drop the remaining photos around some notes we took from the day of the trip [with some annotations]:

Hawk on rock, flew when we got out to look (osprey, actually) [what is an osprey doing at Mono Lake?]

 

Bodie
Bumpy road. Very dusty.

[YouTube now (12/01/2012) has an option to stabilize your videos! This is great for all of our shaky iPhone movies]

[Apparently, at its height, Bodie gained a reputation for being quite a dangerous place, with homicides becoming a near-daily occurrence]

[also there were these houses and each one had a little backstory about the people who owned them]

Chinatown
Armor plating

[They installed some hydroelectric power generation in Bodie back in the day. "Back in the day" as in "installed the power lines in straight lines because they were worried that the electricity would have difficulty flowing around corners"]

[This motorcycle belonged to a guy who helped provide authentic vehicles for the movie Valkyrie]

[A panoramic view on the way down from Bodie to Mono Lake. We took the western road this time, and it was much easier traveling than the southern road we had taken into Bodie]

Met a guy (came to ask about our golf TDI) with a Golf TDI he runs off biodiesel (some place in SF and another in Berkeley make it; he used to make his own), who is also doing a DIY EV retrofit, maybe

Mono lake - south Tufa

Clouds of flies. Peck vs. chase hunting tactics employed by gulls.
Sze tasted the water - not as salty as the ocean, and not bitter

Devil's Postpile

Hexagons


Large black bird, white wings, ling black tail - 2 of them on the highway

Back to Lee Vining 7pm. Ate at bodie mike's BBQ. Ate at the other restaurant in town (Nicely's) yesterday

Back to Palo Alto at 1 am. Sze drove from Oakdale.

650 mi, 46.8 mpg, 15 hr