Cross country trip: Las Vegas to the Central Valley

Hello! I just got back from my Lake Tahoe trip. Now it's back to work and studying, but I though I should finish my cross-country trip discussion before I moved on to something else. When I left off a few days ago I was talking about arriving in Las Vegas. The sun was strong and it was hot enough to use the street as a frying pan. The heat was pretty easy to forget if you stepped into the shade or hung out by the pool at the hotel. We had planned to stay one night and then complete our drive but one night wasn't enough. Vegas is like that I guess. My birthday was coming up and I didn't want to spend it sitting in the truck driving another 500 miles or so. I was treated to a nice dinner and a show on the Vegas strip. We took the kids up in the Stratosphere and drove around looking at all the neon lights. We watched the crowds move up and down the streets. I don't really know what else to say about our time there. There was so much to see that we gave the city an extra day of our time. We liked it there, but didn't do much of anything. My husband won a little bit of money at the slots, but any huge amounts. That's pretty much it.

After two days in Vegas we were back on the road through the Mojave desert and into California. I've seen weigh stations for trucks in every state I've been in but I had never heard about agricultural inspections until I got to California. These inspection stops are on every major road leading into California but they aren't at the state borders. I-15 has one in the middle of the desert not particularly close to anything. I-80 has one close to the Donner Pass area: a good 30 miles west of the state line. The idea of the inspections are to keep undesirable plants and pests away from the major central valley agriculture areas. As we drove up to the inspection site we were each going through a mental list of everything we had packed with us, trying to figure out if we would pass or not. Our mental lists didn't turn up anything to be worried about but there was no need to worry anyway as the stations weren't staffed that day (and haven't been staffed any days we've gone through them since.)

Our road took us past Edwards Airforce Base and up over Tehachapi Pass, where the San Bernadino Mountains meet the Sierra Nevadas. We stopped in Bakersfield for an early dinner and then continued north to our destination.

Here's some pictures of Las Vegas and one of a wind farm on Tehachapi Pass.