Wagon ho!

Woke up this morning at the marvelous Keogh Hot Springs, and didn't want to leave.  Somehow just sitting there looking at the trees after all those days of desert was just so relaxing. We didn't go get back in the hot water, or we may never have left.

This creek was too hot to put your hand in.

We did roll out around ten and head up the road for Lee Vining and Mono Lake. Neither of us had been there or knew much about it. We stopped at a little museum and got some info, then went to the south end of the lake to see the tufa gardens.

They really are beautiful, marred only by the fact that we shouldn't be seeing them. Tufa form underwater, and the only reason they're available to look at and walk through is that the Mono Lake freshwater tributaries are diverted to water LA lawns. The lake level has dropped a long way, exposing the tufa formations.

We had a car picnic at the lake, walked the tufa gardens, and then headed up the road for Virginia Creek Settlement, where we are staying. In a covered wagon. Yes, in a covered  wagon, with no AC or heat or refrigerator or personal bathroom, and that's how it is.  If you didn't want quirky, you wouldn't be hanging out with me, right?  You don't think I am going to miss the chance to sleep in a covered wagon just because there's a motel five miles away, do you?

There is a creek (Virginia Creek) just at the edge of our campsite, and the Settlement has a decent restaurant where we may have diner, and the turn-off to Bodie (where we're headed tomorrow) is just a mile down the road.  So it's all good. Also, they have very cool pine cones here, and you know I am a sucker for pine cones.  I will fill my Howard Johnson ice bucket with them.

Also, I bought some Reese's Peanut Butter Cups as a compensatory offering for the covered-wagon thing, and there's still one left.  It might get us through the evening, anyway.

And then on to Bodie!