#roadsurfer

Algumas imagens que tirei durante o roteiro que fiz em Portugal

Some pictures I took during my road trip in Portugal 🇵🇹

75€ Roadsurfer Gutschein … 

Für alle Fremdgeher, die mal nicht ihren T2 nutzen können, oder sich auch eine Auszeit in einem modernen Reisemobil gönnen wollen.

Ihr habt die Chance auf 75€ Rabatt bei roadsurfer. Folgt einfach dem Link: Roadsurfer-Rabattcode und gebt meine Mailadresse an: [email protected] ☀️👍🏼

So we're up—no I'm up—at 530 yesterday. I'm "up" enough to hit the snooze button on my phone alarm to buy me ten minutes of not getting out of bed. A well deserved ten minutes, by the way, after a Monday of getting ready to leave: laundry, mail, providing for the cats, cleaning in and around the house, and so on. I don't think we started actual packing of bags for our camping trip until evening.

To be clear, packing for camping takes into account an extra two roller bags about four feet long each that end up packing about 45 pounds of gear each.

We didn't get to bed until 1230 AM on the same morning we're to depart eight and a half hours later: 9AM.

By the time I get Kimmer's morning coffee ready, it's 6AM ish and she's out of bed shortly after that, even whipping up a tasty baked pear for us to enjoy before we have to jet.

So we're out the door at 740. Our Lyft shows up ten minutes later. We're at Paine Field fifteen minutes after that having been dropped at the front entrance to the terminal, not the one for ride shares. Thanking our driver, we race through the doors to check in at the kiosk after having finalized our baggage details and payment in the Alaska app on the ride over.

Unfortunately we're too late for the kiosk so we're waved over to the desk where we're handled and sent along to TSA where we meet a family of four: mom, dad, and their two little boys, identical twins, two to three years-old and apparently on their perpetual own adventure with one of them able to say the number "two". ☺️

After a bit of restin' in the terminal, our flight takes off on time, uneventful, 9AM, during which we read, we listen, we work on finishing the sliced fruit we brought with us and the Caesar salad we scored from Trader Joe's. For entertainment, there was a little kid at the window seat across the aisle who was basically doing an information dump of everything he knows in the world despite his father's pleadings.

My favorite moment?

The point he started singing the ABC song at full volume, the top of his lungs. Nearly screaming it.

Don't know what to tell you. I thought that was funny as hell. I was down for that kind of in-flight experience... apparently. 🙂

So we land in Las Vegas just after eleven and, by the time we're at Road Surfer HQ in Vegas, it's coming up on 1230, an hour-and-a-half before check in. So Kimmer goes in to ask if we can check in this early and...

The answer's yes, whereupon we embark on a self-directed tutorial followed by Q&A with a rep who addresses our questions. A quick phone call afterward with our insurance guy confirms that, yes, buy the Road Surfer insurance. And after all that, coming up on 2, we're on the road.

We're not going long, though. We're making our way to the western edge of town with stops at a Walmart Neighborhood, a GoodWill, a Grocery Outlet, and a Trader Joe's for food and supplies we didn't travel with.

By 445 we are on the road outta town, though. Pretty dark. Nighttime but for a bit of light above the mountains indicating a still setting sun on the other side.

Almost two hours later, we're headed into Death Valley National Park from the Nevada side. It's so dark by now along the way that we can make out neither the valley nor the desert. It's all just shades of black resolving into the next stretch of road then the next.

We arrive in the Stovepipe Wells campground at 7, driving all the way to the back of the campground as previously instructed by Kimmer's cousin, then take a left. At the end of that left, we seem not an inch closer to finding her cousin's camp site until taking a second left and there he is, walking toward us the dark.

Space 156, by the way, is ours. Kimmer's second cousin and his best friend help guide us into our space in the dark and BAM.

Here we are.

Kimmer takes a moment to welcome and be welcomed while I work on popping the top of the RV, creating a second story space we'll use for both storage and a study area for Kimmer.

After taking possession from her cousin of the power battery we shipped directly to him so he could transport it to Death Valley... and after opening her birthday gifts from her cousin and opening a lovely message from a friend in Orange County, Kimmer took over the RV, setting up its interior with the unpackings for our next few days here.

The rest of the night we all hang out.

At some point, Kimmer's cousin's troubleshooting why one of the burners of his grill isn't working and—hand to God—it looks like he's using his camping igniter like a flame thrower.

Not sure if that worked. Positive, though, that nothing and nobody got blown up.

So yeah. We're off to a great start.

Eventually it's Harry Potter branded Uno with the boys that's always a lot of crazy loud fun.

By eleven, though, everyone's in bed 'cause we're all tired. It was a busy full day on top of a busy full week leading up to our Death Valley Thanksgiving stay. So we're taking advantage of the rest and peace afforded by being here.

One last thing:

Even though the nights are cold (fifties this time around, thank goodness), the sky is magnificent. Not like Huntington Lake that's seven thousand feet closer to the sky than five feet in elevation where we are in Death Valley. It's magnificent because of how much of the sky you can see from here. It's magnificent not because of the closeness of stars and constellations. It's magnificent because of the mind boggling number of those heavenly bodies you can actually see. It's the widest sky I've ever seen. The largest canvas across which the known universe is painted. It even seems like I can see an arm of the spiral galaxy we collectively occupy as a species. I'll definitely take more looks for it if I can stay up later passed all the local RV lights being turned off for the night.

For now, I continue stargazing at night. The view is both transfixing and addicting. Such is the emotional and intellectual impact of all those stars from this dry ground beneath our feet.

It's a rare moment in life for us on this, our first night here.

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