- Travelling to Las Vegas
- Las Vegas, day 1
- Las Vegas, day 2 before Hoover dam
- Visiting Hoover dam
- Las Vegas, day 2 after Hoover dam
- Las Vegas, day 3
- Las Vegas, day 4
- Death Valley, part 1
- Death Valley, part 2
- Arriving at Lone Pine after Death Valley.
- Leaving Lone Pine.
- Driving from Lone Pine to Mammoth Lakes
- Around and in Mammoth Lakes
- Driving from Mammoth Lakes to Lake Tahoe.
- Lake Tahoe
- Spending the day at Tahoe Lake, mostly at the beach.
- Driving from Tahoe Vista to Chico via Reno
- The Sierra Nevada Brewery
- Staying the night in Oroville, 24 miles from Chico (and the Sierra Nevada Brewery).
- Driving from Oroville to Sonora
- Sonora
- Driving towards and in Yosemite national park
- Madera
- Driving from Madera to Santa Cruz
- Santa Cruz
- Driving from Santa Cruz to San Francisco
- San Francisco
- Muri Woods
- Palo Alto, Mountain View
- San Francisco
- Observations
Visiting Hoover dam
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.Death Valley, part 2
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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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Did a quick stop to get a feel of the temperature outside (about 43C / 110F).
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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.Arriving at Lone Pine after Death Valley.
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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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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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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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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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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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A neat house at June Lake. There is a not so visible waterfall in the mountain behind it.
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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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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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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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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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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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The road went through a canyon with a little creek in it. There were a lot of people fishing here.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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The similarity between this place and the fjords of Norway is quite large.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).Driving from Tahoe Vista to Chico via Reno
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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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The GPS lead us here, some rural place where they grew peaches, apricots, blueberrys and whatnot.The Sierra Nevada Brewery
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Suddenly, an awesome smell lay in the air. We got close to the hops cooler! Awesome.
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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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Some nice folks we met that just had dropped their daughter of at Chico University. A heated political discussion arose, as they are republicans.Staying the night in Oroville, 24 miles from Chico (and the Sierra Nevada Brewery).
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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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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.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.Driving towards and in Yosemite national park
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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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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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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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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.Driving from Madera to Santa Cruz
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Our trusty GPS brought us out on some rural roads. Apparently, it's tomato season.
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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.Santa Cruz
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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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There were some sort of sailing race, so we saw a bunch of boats. This, however, seems to only contain tourists.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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We stopped to smell the flowers. Although this one did not smell much, it was kind of cool.
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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.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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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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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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The road to Muri Woods was a fun drive. As long as there were no cars going the other way.
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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.Palo Alto, Mountain View
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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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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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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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Duck boat. Looks ridiculous, but a quite fun concept. We did not try it, however.
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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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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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We stopped for a beer at this beergarten where they focused on the brewery Rouge.
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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.