Tufar

Our last long driving day of the trip was also our last planned scenic day. Mono Lake is just a short drive up the highway from Bishop so we intended to stop there on the way out since we both had seen so many pictures from the lake and I've driven past a couple times but had never stopped. We had considered a stop in nearby Bodie, a huge ghost town just north of the lake but it's easily a full day to do it any sort of justice so that will have to wait for a return visit (with more appropriate wheel/tire combo apparently).

Mono Lake is famous for it's iconic Tufa Towers which are columns of deposits left behind when the water level receded. They're calcified and freestanding and give a very alien landscape appearance. We headed to the south tufa formation and got to drive down another well graded gravel road to the visitor center. After hiking through the formations there we headed over to Navy Beach which was down a slightly less maintained, single lane, gravel road where we got to chase a jack rabbit for a bit. Some of the Tufas at Navy Beach were made of sand and had a much different appearance and these are apparently very fragile too. This beach provided a great spot to get panoramic pictures with the lake and tufas in the foreground and the mountains in the background.

Back in the car we still had about 450 more miles to drive and it was already about noon. We made our way back into Nevada for a bit and stopped for lunch in Carson City, where we saw a TTS convertible. Not many TT sightings since we had left TT-West the week before. Carson City to Susanville isn't especially interesting but from Susanville to Ashland we were going through Lassen National Forest which I've always loved. This takes you through dense forest with some volcanic scenery mixed in. As Russ put it though, as you continue driving it feels like someone is adding highway ahead of you and that you'll never make it to I-5. It didn't help that this was heavily patrolled by the CHP and we were getting sporadic laser hits from someplace too. We did finally get to I-5 and made the last 70 or so miles up the highway back to Oregon and landed in Ashland,

We wandered down the street from our Best Western to the Ashland Springs Hotel, where we had stayed for TT-West way back in 2007 on my last sabbatical, and had another excellent meal even though it was the last one served for the night since we got in so late. I have to say that I'll miss being able to walk from the hotel down to a restaurant and back. At home we can walk to a Mongolian or Thai place and that's really about it.

Ashland was our last real vacation day as our next stop would be home. We started the next morning off with a coffee stop in nearby Talent with Russ and then it was back on I-5 for the familiar slog through traffic back to Portland. Although it was probably our shortest driving day of the trip I think it felt like the longest. Some day we'll have to find a more scenic way to bypass the interstate back to home.

All told we traveled 3800 miles across 6 states and consumed 145 gallons of gas. I've got about 1200 pictures to go through and several videos so that should keep me busy until the next trip in July :)