Honeymoon Day 22: Fresno to St. George

We arrived in Fresno around 11pm and pulled into the parking lot of a Super 8 Motel. While I checked us in, my yin watched a prostitute stroll by on the road running in front of the motel. Fresno is the agricultural center of California, which makes it a mecca for long-haul truck drivers, and one can only assume that this concentration of lonely, road-weary men also makes it a well-prostituted area.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that the motel room was both clean and quiet, and we got a great night's sleep before leaving early the next morning. On Allison and Andrew's recommendation, we had decided to go to Zion National Park, and along the way we wanted to see the massive trees in:

While the redwood is renowned as the world's tallest tree, the sequoia is both the largest in circumference and overall volume:

my tree-hugging yin

In fact, this specific tree, named the General Sherman, is the single largest in the world:

over two thousand years old

Walking around in a grove of these giant trees left both of us speechless, and it was hard to believe that such a massive being could come from such a small source:

before

after

After leaving Yosemite, I had told my yin that at least I didn't have to worry about being eaten by a bear anymore; but on our walk down to see the General Sherman this is what we saw twenty feet from the path:

an adolescent (brown) black bear

This was far closer than any of our other bear encounters, and the above image was taken without the benefit of a telephoto lens. Wanting an even closer look, I sprinted back to our vehicle in the parking lot to retrieve it (a decision that would prove to be unwise), but by the time I made it back the bear had retreated back behind some boulders:

I think he probably wanted a siesta...

When we finally returned to the car, I realized that our car keys had fallen out of my shorts' pocket. Luckily, I had the foresight to wire a spare key to the car's undercarriage before we left Florida, just in case of this type of situation. Nonetheless, the lack of keyless entry was a slight inconvenience, and I spent the rest of the day doubly paranoid about locking ourselves out of the car.

Leaving the park, we got stuck in an hour-long delay because of road construction, and it soon became clear that we wouldn't be able to make it to Zion. We called ahead to St. George, Utah, and booked another cheap motel room. When the the flag man (woman, actually) allowed us to continue down the mountain, we zipped our way through the rest of central California. These are some of the things we saw:

wind farms

oil fields

and lady bugs

One of my favorite sights, though, was this road sign just outside of Bakersfield.

I emailed it to my grandmother

When the sun went down, we had only made it as far as Barstow, and I had random snippets of Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas running around my head. We were about to enter "bat country", the winds were blowing warmly across the night, and a full moon loomed over the Mojave Desert:

i
m
age
miss
in
g

We sped across the empty lands of southeastern California and passed Las Vegas just before midnight, arriving in the land of the Mormons sometime after 1am...

the image of Las Vegas receding into the past...