Travelling to Las Vegas

Starting of with a Gin & Tonic for the younglings. The old guy went with Fanta.
I have never looked close at Aeroflot's logo before...
Greenland. I think.
After a few hours on the plane, with many more hours to go.
Garden ornament that was sold in the Delta catalogue.

Las Vegas, day 1

The room at Trump.
The room at Trump.
The room at Trump.
The room at Trump. TV in the bathroom mirror.
The room at Trump. Phone by the toilet. Of course.

Las Vegas, day 2 before Hoover dam

View from the room
Brunch. A bit more cheese than expected.
Driving in Las Vegas, towards Radio Shack.
Posing by the car.

Visiting Hoover dam

The beauty and perspective of the landscape is impossible to capture in full, but here we are driving out of Las Vegas.
A bit late for a photo, but this store sells garden ornaments of diverse types and sizes.
Again, a landscape that was hard to capture.
Again, a landscape that was hard to capture.
The interstate has been rebuilt, so our GPS got very confused when we followed this sign.
Transformers. Not the Michael Bay kind.
The new bridge, opened last year.
Pontus found a truck that he liked.
On the viewing deck beside the dam.
The newly built bridge.
A model of a generator. Later pictures will show only the top part, from the platform with the railing.
One of the pipes leading water to the generators. It might be the only pipe feeding the Nevada side generators.
An image of the flows in the dam.
Pontus in a cave.
The Nevada side generators. An identical set of generators is located on the Arizona side of the dam.
The passageway to the Nevada elevator, going right into the dam. Walls, celing and floor are all original from when the dam was built, and they see no reason to replace it.
Pontus and Tobias in front of some bars inside the dam. See annotated dam picture.
View over the newly built bridge and the canyon from between the bars in the opening in the dam.
"The starway to heaven", from the bottom of the dam to the top. Image to show the inclination
"The starway to heaven", downward.
"The starway to heaven", upward.
The Nevada side intake towers.
The Nevada side spillway. This is where excess water flows down to bypass the dam.
The Nevada side spillway. This regulates when waters starts to flow past the dam. The white line on the mountains in the backgrounds shows the highest water level yet.
Monument with a flag pole comemmorating the builders of the dam. As a worker, you earned at the least 4 USD per day, and was expected to come in every day of the week. You had the possibility to have two days of a year (without pay, of course) on 4th of July and on Christmas day. Any attempt at unionizing would obviously lead to a direct termination of your employment.
The dam as seen from the bridge.
A cable rig, the longest and probably one of the oldest one in use today. Crosses the canyon and is *the* way to lower equipment down the canyon, to for example the generator buildings.
On the bridge, towards Nevada.
We bought some potato chips. The actually tasted like a hot dog with mustard and ketchup.
On our way back to Las Vegas.

Las Vegas, day 2 after Hoover dam

Practical handles on the Vodka bottles.
Del Taco. Much funnier if you have bought things from the Swedish IT-hardware distributer Deltaco.
The Eiffel Tower. Almost.
The kids became tired, so I fixed them some coffee.

Las Vegas, day 3

A train that passes just below our window. It does that at night as well, and uses the horn like crazy.
Pontus is hungover and playing with his lamp for some reason.
Pontus looking at a Hello Kitty store with something longing in his eyes.
The Venetian.
The Mirage.
The Vegas Eiffel Tower.
The Cosmopolitan and the Bellagio sign.

Las Vegas, day 4

Waiting for our car at the hotel entrance for the last time this trip.
Waiting for breakfast at International House Of Pancakes (IHOP).
Breakfast at IHOP.
Pontus found a new car that he liked.

Death Valley, part 1

Not the very best job in the world.
We are heading towards the mountains.
Nice mountains on the side as well.
Heading towards the mountains.

Death Valley, part 2

Flat landscape.
Nice house.
Entering Death Valley.
Paying to drive inside the park.
They are not kidding.
Mountains approaching.
Fun road to drive on. Heading towards Dante's View.
Fun road to drive. Heading towards Dante's View.
Last part of the road up to Dante's View.
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The car is parked. Heading towards the closest peak to take a panorama.
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360 degree panorama from a peak close to Dante's View in Death Valley national park.
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A very colorful bush, compared to everything else.
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You do not want to drive too far.
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Some resort inside the park.
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Driving in the park.
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Did a quick stop to get a feel of the temperature outside (about 43C / 110F).
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Sand dunes.
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Hill between the road and the sand dunes.
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Sand. Lots of it.
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Some guy that was quite thirsty.
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The temperature at the sand dunes were 123F (50C) according to the car. Captured a pic just after it went down to a cool 121F (49C). It was quite windy, which made it feel like we were standing in front of a hair dryer.
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We saw quite a few mini-tornados blowing up sand while going through the landscape.
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Going down in the valley, the white stuff that the road crosses through are salt flats.
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Going further down between the mountains. The scale is hard to capture, the mountains are huge.
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A bit scary drop on the side of the road.
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Beautiful landscape.

Arriving at Lone Pine after Death Valley.

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Alabama Hills inn in Lone Pine, where we stayed the night.
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The room at Alabama Hills.
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During the flight between New York and Las Vegas, my hard drive broke. So I bought a new one at best buy this morning and finally had time to replace it. Luckily, I was able to pursuade the old drive to boot in Pontus' computer, and after a night of dd+nc, my laptop was restored.
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Someone seems to have gone through some effort to mark the nearby mountain with L-P, for Lone Pine.
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Downtown Lone Pine at the early evening.
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We bought a case of Epic IPA in the general store in Lone Pine, and decided that it was awesome. When we found a flyer for free beer tasting at the Mammoth Brewing company's store, we decided that Mammoth Lakes were our next goal.

Leaving Lone Pine.

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Lone Pine city limit.
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Downtown Lone Pine during the day. Apparently, many western movies has been shot here.

Driving from Lone Pine to Mammoth Lakes

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Still some snow left at the mountain tops.
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A fairly common sight; RVs that are towing a smaller car for shorter expeditions.
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This country is all about the slogans. Another one is "Drive sober, or get pulled over".
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Mighty mountains.
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The road goes up and down, through passes and over ridges.
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Yet another RV towing a smaller car. A strangely large majority of the smaller cars are Jeeps.

Around and in Mammoth Lakes

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"The Village" in Mammoth Lakes. Starbucks had WiFi, so we booked a room in the green/brown building in the background. Having internet when travelling around without a plan: Best thing ever.
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Beer cooler in a general store. The hatred towards Swedish alcohol policy is growing by the minute.
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Beer cooler in a general store. Note that the beers are actually quite good beers. About 1.5 coolers contained boring Bud*-crap, and the rest 2.5 where just pure awesome.
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Beer coolder in a general store. Note Hop Ottin' IPA.
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Everything is bigger here, these are pine cones.
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The pine needles were also huge.
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A dead tree eaten by termites.
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A neat house at June Lake. There is a not so visible waterfall in the mountain behind it.
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June Lake.
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Grant Lake. The water was a bit too cold for taking a dip.
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We went to the gondola station at Mammoth mountain.
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This seems to be a ski resort in winter and a down hill slope in the summer. Lots of people with mountain bikes took the gondola up to the summit.
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Photo of Pontus taking a photo of a snow groomer converted into a burrito stand.
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Tobias found some snow beside the parking lot.
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Note how inflated the bags are. We had to ask to be certain, and yes. It's because of the altitude (ca 2300 m / 7000 ft above sea level).
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The beers where quit a lot larger than in Sweden as well.
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The Mammoth Brewing Company store.
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We tasted 8 of the beers that they made. Free of charge! ..but we of course bought some gear from them and complained that they are not available in Sweden.
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Pontus looking very happy. And a lot like Will Wheaton.
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At Gomez's, a mexican restaurant adjacent to our lodge. We have just ordered in some tequila samplers, with my personal favourite beeing the one to the left in the top, a Coralecho. The pink stuff is some sort of grape soda, that helped clearing the taste buds between the different tequilas.

Driving from Mammoth Lakes to Lake Tahoe.

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These are sold in Sweden under the name "Den gamle fabrik", which sounds danish.
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An american football training. How quaint.
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Beautiful landscape.
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There is still some snow at the peaks.
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We bought a slightly overpriced GPS at Macy's in Las Vegas. It keeps shutting down when it gets to hot, but it does the job. Most of the time, anyway.
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Beautiful landscape.
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The road keeps going up and down, and through passes like this.
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We drove past quite a few signs like this, which are very nice.
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Another pass. Amazing view.
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Amazing view again.
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The road went through a canyon with a little creek in it. There were a lot of people fishing here.
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Aww, someone was tired.
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The roads were either winding...
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Amazing view.
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...or just very straight.

Lake Tahoe

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No railing and a steep drop beside the road. In some places, there were small hole in the asphalt, where there had been a slide.
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We did a quick stop at a vista overlooking Emerald Bay.
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The similarity between this place and the fjords of Norway is quite large.
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Emerald Bay.
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Emerald Bay.
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Lake Tahoe.
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Why get a bag in box when you can get a jug?
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Ouch?
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Lake Tahoe viewed from Tahoe City.
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Sign at the ticket booth of the Tahoe Gal.
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Lake Tahoe, driving from Tahoe City to Tahoe Vista.
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The Fire Lite Lodge, where we bought a room for two nights.

Spending the day at Tahoe Lake, mostly at the beach.

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The beach at Sand Harbour. Note the snowy mountain tops in the background of the lake.
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Panorama over the beach. Pontus is helping some kids catch what is probably a cray fish (kräfta).
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Nice rock formation.
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A lot of people were diving of these cliffs, really nice.
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And there was also squirrels.
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Pizza dinner at MOFO'S.
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Why call them roundabouts when you can call them a "traffic circle"?
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STOP!

Driving from Tahoe Vista to Chico via Reno

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Svedka - Imported Swedish vodka
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We drove through some amazing landscapes.
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A nice view.
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A nice view.
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Suburban areas of Reno.
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Through the mountains again.
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This is a typical place to be murdered if your car breaks down at night. Luckliy, ours did not. And we are also not sorority girls.
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Panorama from a scenic point along the way.
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This obsession with huge things has got to stop.
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The GPS lead us here, some rural place where they grew peaches, apricots, blueberrys and whatnot.
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A cool plateu we were driving by.
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A large area of really cool hills.

The Sierra Nevada Brewery

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The Sierra Nevada Brewery
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Happy as a boy at christmas eve, as you can see.
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Our very energetic and passionate tour guide.
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A mill
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Boiler
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We got to taste some wort.
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Suddenly, an awesome smell lay in the air. We got close to the hops cooler! Awesome.
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A hop
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Ready to fill
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The brewery had the largest private installation of solar power. Along with fuel cells they produced 70-90% of the electricity that they used. I told them that they should advertise this better, but they refuse to see it as anything but natural if you want to produce a really good and natural beer.
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Solar panel boy.
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A botteler
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After the tour, it was time to taste some beer!
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Very nice interior.
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They had all of the current beers on tap, of course.
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Some nice folks we met that just had dropped their daughter of at Chico University. A heated political discussion arose, as they are republicans.
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Awesome bar.

Staying the night in Oroville, 24 miles from Chico (and the Sierra Nevada Brewery).

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In the motel reception. Feels safe.
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Our first real american motel, like in the movies.
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With a cheap price comes not the best standard. Two double beds did apparently mean two quite small beds. I will sleep on the floor tonight.

Driving from Oroville to Sonora

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As we drove through the rural landscape of California, we realized that there has got to be a huge volume of fruit produced here.
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These signs were everywhere.
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In Maryville, we found a nice little pond.
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We also found a guy who found or camera amusing.
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We also found ugly cars.
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...and water towers. These were also everywhere.
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One of the larger cars towed behind an RV. One starts to wonder how large engines the RVs have.
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This was also a fairly common site, a forklift hanged to the back of trucks.
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Another water tower.
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Fruit tree field in the making.
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Corn.
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Roads were yet again quite straight.
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...with the occational bend when nature was in the way.
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Nature.
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Nature.
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Nature.
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Nature.
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Nature. Up the mountain we go..
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Panorama from the amazing Montezuma Road

Sonora

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Our room at INNS of California
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Where we stayed the night in Sonora
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Ww have went over half-time in the journey and needed to do some laundry. We were extremely fascinated by these imperialistic laundry machines.
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In case anyone doubted that we are in the USA...

Driving towards and in Yosemite national park

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Driving towards Yosemite.
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Panorama from a vista point where we stopped on the way. There is a lot of mountains here.
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Just like in Death Valley (that is also a park), we had to pay a $20 fee to enter. Considering how extremely nice the roads were, it felt worth the money. It must be a huge job to take care of those.
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We stopped on the way up the mountain side to have a look. This is the view to the other side.
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This is the view down. Note the "small" river flowing in the bottom of the canyon with the full size pine trees beside it.
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Livin' on the edge.
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The view at our stop down Yosemite Valley.
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We were not the only ones here, though.
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The scale is hard to capture, but inside the valley we were surrounded by pretty huge mountains.
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The picture came out really bad, but it seems like they have a court right in Yosemite Valley.
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Standing below this cliff made you feel small. Again, hard to capture the size.
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The sequoia trees in Yosemite were originally protected from forest fires with some effort, but this lead to them starting to die off. It was discovered that the trees need forest fires to be able to reproduce and for the ground not to be overtaken by other sorts of trees. Now they are doing controlled fires, we saw a few (along with a few firemen) on the road up to Glacier Point.
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On the way, there were suddenly a bunch of cars parked. We snapped this picture of what seems to be a bear cub on a medow close to the road, that made everyone stop.
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Panorama from a Vista on our way up to glacier point. With some trees on the other side, it is possible to start appreciating the scale of things.
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A picture of upper and lower Yosemite waterfalls. Or at least that's what some guy there said.
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And there was also squirrels.
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The largest panorama yet, taken from Glacier point and comprised of 7 individual pictures. This shows just above 180 degrees of the view over Yosemite Valley from Glacier Point, including the valley floor. The huge summit with extremely straight walls on the other side is said to be some sort of Mekka for climbers.
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Everybody knows that the bird is the word.
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On our way between Yosemite and Madera, we stopped at Pizza Factory in Oakhurst. Here, they actually spun the pizza on a finger while kneding it.
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We saw this very cute guy that helped his mother or bigger sister to sell honey by the road.

Madera

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This does not seem to be a good part of town. Signs for bail bonds everywhere and lots of beat-up trucks.
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Chilling out in the room.
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View from the room.
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Madera Valley Inn, where we stayed.

Driving from Madera to Santa Cruz

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Now, this is something that you don't see everyday in Sweden.
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Our trusty GPS brought us out on some rural roads. Apparently, it's tomato season.
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We decided to have breakfast in this quite pink/purple place.
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As per usual, the breakfast is awesome. We had to wait for a while, as we accidentally went there on a sunday, just after church.
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The landscape was as usual very nice.
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Fields.

Santa Cruz

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The room where we stayed in Santa Cruz.
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The motel in Santa Cruz.
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We went out on the warf to look around. We first found this pelican.
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Panorama of the south side of the warf.
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We heard some strange noises and found a stair down under the warf. There were sea lions. Lots of them.
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This lay closest to where we were standing. A cute little fellow.
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There were some sort of sailing race, so we saw a bunch of boats. This, however, seems to only contain tourists.
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Panorama over the north side of the warf.

Driving from Santa Cruz to San Francisco

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Pontus got a tip from an old couple that he sat next to yesterday to eat lunc at Duarte's Tavern in Pescadero. As it was on the way up, we set the GPS and went on our way.
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Driving along highway 1.
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We stopped to smell the flowers. Although this one did not smell much, it was kind of cool.
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We also saw a lighthouse.
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Duarte's Tavern. Food was ok, I made a poor choice that did not taste much. Pontus' food was however very good.
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Driving along highway 1.

San Francisco

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Arriving in San Francisco. The sign summarizes everything about driving here: You are always in the wrong lane.
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It was a foggy day.
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The golden gate bridge, wrapped in fog.
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The hotel room at Hilton by the airport (not Hilton Village). A nice room and all, but the hotel was awful. No complimentary wifi, parking, drinkable water, or anything of that sort. The restaurant had good food, but some of the waiters barely spoke english and kept on refilling our drinks after about 3 sips. We miss Trump in Las Vegas.
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A large plane landing at SFO.
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Panorama over SFO. Note how the fog that is thick like a cloud lies below the mountain tops.

Muri Woods

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Don't kid yourself; San Francisco is cold, compared to just a few miles inland. This is a car in the hotel parking lot that we saw when driving away around 09.30.
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Some nice houses on the hill.
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The road to Muri Woods was a fun drive. As long as there were no cars going the other way.
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Lots of pictures of the forest comming up.
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Standing in front of a redwood.
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This is a fairly representative picture of "a" redwood tree. They seem to be growing in groups and actually merge with each other when they get close enough. This means that "one" tree can get a hollow part in the middle.
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The entrance to Muir Woods.

Palo Alto, Mountain View

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Approaching Stanford.
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The William Gates building, Computer Science's building.
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Some hardware pic for Lunde.
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Walking in the quad.
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A library.
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The quad.
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Another library.
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The department of Chemistry. It seems to be undergoing some renovation.
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Now, this is not a photoshopped picture. We came across this while driving from Stanford towards Google HQ.
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Fanta prides themself with not containing anything real at all.
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You have got to have your own street here.
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Google bikes, free to loan for transportation around the Google campus here.
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We stumbled upon this lawn with statues for all public Android releases.
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The Microsoft offices.
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Panorama taken from Treasure Island, with the south part of bay bridge to the left. The camera were not particulary found of the lighting conditions, and the image is therefore provided as-is with no guarantees what so ever.
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Took a shot at some HDR photography of the Bay Bridge. There were some baseball game in the stadium behind the bridge though. Very annoying.

San Francisco

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A sign on the mountain when we drove towards the city from our hotel at the airport.
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Classic picture with the hills.
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Seems a bit trick to drive into these ports.
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Again with the slogans.
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Lombard street.
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Lombard street, this time from below.
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Duck boat. Looks ridiculous, but a quite fun concept. We did not try it, however.
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A WW2 submarine.
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The cabel car barn & museeum. This is the actual machinery that drives the San Francisco cable cars by pulling wires under the streets. The museeum was full of technical details, how they are driven, etc. Very fun for tech junkies like us.
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Winding machinery from a different angle.
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And so the cables go down underground.
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After the cable car museeum, our guide met up with us and took us on a tour of China Town.
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...then Union Square, followed by "The Tenderloin", where I was afraid to pull up my camera.
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After all the reading about the cable car and walking, we took the Cable Car to the Italian district to eat. This is inside the cable car.
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In the cable car.
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We stopped for a beer at this beergarten where they focused on the brewery Rouge.
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The best salt and pepper shakers I have ever seen.
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We also noticed this pole. Not so visible from 1.5 m away, but..
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..if you move in close, you can see that it has been exposed for a number of poster campains in its days.
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Outside the Italian restaurant after dinner with its owner. He seemed to be mostly "managing", by walking around and talking to people. According to our guide, he could sometimes be seen outside singing opera as well. The place was so small (about 25-30 places), but I guess that it's the italian way.

Thinking back

305 swedish miles and lots of motel nights later...

Observations:

  • We have seen more vetrinary hospitals than normal hospitals
  • The roads are often awesome
  • Too little salt in the food

Things that should be brought to Sweden:

  • Cold beer with a broad assortment in normal stores
  • Snapple
  • Beef jerky
  • Corn nuts
  • Turn right on red traffic light

Things that should not be brought to Sweden:

  • Tap water with a distinct taste and smell of chlorine (in some cases just like swimming pool water)
  • Coffee that taste like water
  • Wierd faucets



This page was last changed by zqad on 17/08 - 2011.