A couple friends of ours from Fargo planned a trip to Vegas last week. Originally, they were going to get married there, but they called off the wedding and just went there for a vacation since their tickets were already paid for. It was also our 2 year wedding anniversary, and since we had gotten married in Vegas ourselves, it seemed like a good idea to meet up with them there. So we booked a room at the Excalibur and took some vacation time.
Before heading there, Val noticed on the map that there was a ghost town named Calico just off the road on our route to Vegas. That sounded interesting so we looked into it a bit more and found that they had a campsite, cabins, and a bunkhouse to rent. Our hotel was booked Tues-Thurs. night so I came up with the bright idea of leaving a day earlier than we originally had planned and camping out at Calico the night before.
Before we left, Val called to see if we needed to make reservations. She checked on the availability of the cabins and found that they were all booked, but the campsites were all open. We decided to pack the tent and camp out there.
Day 1
We woke up around 4:30 AM Mon. morning, and after packing, taking some time to wake up a little and checking the house, we hit the road around 5:15 AM. We took the 101 down to Gilroy, then headed east on 152 up through the Pacheco Pass. As we started up the pass I felt the familiar rumbling of my bowls that indicated I needed to stop somewhere soon to use the restroom. We still had 20 some miles before hitting I-5, so when I saw a visitor center I took the opportunity to stop. To my dismay, the visitor center itself was closed, but they had a couple of portable outhouses sitting in a parking area there.
When I walked into the outhouse, I seriously questioned if I needed to go that badly. It was nasty inside. Toilet paper hung from the seat, and the toilet itself was nearly overflowing. The rumble in my gut told me that it was nearing an emergency, so I decided I needed to suck it up and go about my business. I left there feeling dirty, but relieved. I feel sorry for the next person who had to go inside there to see what I added to the pile, though.
Before we hit the road again, we had to stop and admire the landscape. The spot we had pulled off overlooked a lake nestled in the hills. It was quite scenic, especially with the early morning light. We took a number of photos like this one before hitting the road.
We hit I-5 20-30 minutes later. We would take this for 120 some miles. Much of it reminded us of ND, except for the fact that we could see mountains on the horizon. And the almond tree fields we passed. And the vineyards. And the number of other crops we passed that would never grow in ND. A couple stretches of road looked like a brush fire had passed through in recent years. The ground was black, with patches of dry yellow grasses.
We drove along I-5 until we hit the turnoff for 46, though the town of Wasco. (Wascolly Wabbit! ) Just before hitting Wasco, we saw what I think was the state penitentiary. There were guard towers all along the fence around the excercise yard. I kind of wanted to stop and take a couple pictures, but thought better of it. It was a fair distance from the road, but I didn't want to risk being stopped and questioned about why I was taking pictures of the prison. They probably would have suspected me of trying to mastermind some huge prison break or something.
Once we hit 99, we turned south towards Bakersfield for 20 some miles. There we turned onto 58, gassed up and headed out on the next long stretch of road, and the last for the day. The part of Bakersfield we were able to see from the road made it look like kind of a run-down town. There were lots of run-down houses with grafiti on them, and it just didn't look like a generally nice place to live.
Highway 58 took us up through the 2nd of 3 passes we would need to go through; Tehachapi pass. It had some nice scenery and we pulled over at one spot to get a few photos. There were a number of places I would have liked to stop for pictures, but there was no good place to pull over so we had to be satisfied with what Val could take with the point & shoot while driving.
Just before reaching Barstow around noon, we crossed over the Mohave river. It would have made a great photo op because the river itself was dry, so it was basically a river of sand. There was again no good place to pull over, though so we continued on to Barstow, where we switched roads to I-15, the final road that would bring us to Vegas.
Before leaving Barstow, we stopped at a Popeye's for lunch. In the same little parking area they had an interesting looking strip mall with a couple of fast food places, gift shops, etc. After lunch, I snapped a couple pictures and we headed towards Calico, where we planned to spend the night.
We arrived at Calico and were told we could just pick out a camping spot, and a ranger would be buy to collect the camping fees. So we drove around both of the main sites. Both were deserted at the time. Not a single person there. The roads were extremely rocky, and I found myself hoping that they wouldn't puncture the tires of the Trailblazer. We drove around both campsites and decided on one away from the cabins. These all had hookups, but we decided to spend the extra $4 for a bit nicer campsite location.
Once we had decided on a campsite location, the fun began. I pulled out the tent, ran the poles through it and got it mostly up. The tent we have will stand on its own, but only barely. It's got the standard dome-style tent poles in the middle, then 2 more poles on the sides. To really stand nicely it needs to be staked down. That's where our first problem came in. The ground was essentially rock and our tent stakes were plastic. We had forgotten to bring a hammer, so I grabbed a big rock and tried to pound the stakes into the ground. It wasn't working well at all. We tried weighting down the corners of the tent with rocks, both inside and outside. It would work for a while until a wind gust would come up. On top of that, it was 110 out, the only shade we had was from the open back of the truck, and carrying around big rocks trying to get the tent to stand nicely was exhausting us.
We got the tent to stand up a bit, then got in the truck and drove up to the ghost town. There we sat in the air conditioned truck for about 10 min, before we got out to look around the town. There were quite a few people wandering around getting in the way of pictures, and the heat soon became unbearable again. We went back to the truck and drove down to a convenience store to get some ice.
When we got back to the tent we found that the sides of the tent had fallen in again. We decided to see if the bunk house was still available. The people at the park office thought we were crazy to spend $60 on the bunk house for only 2 people, but it was worth it. It had a small air conditioner and got us out of the sun. There were 10 bunk beds, for a total of 20 beds, but the matresses didn't look very comfortable so we decided to bring our air matress in to sleep on. While hanging out around the bunk house, I was able to get this photo of one of the dust devils that kept popping up not too far from us.
We hung out at the bunk house for a bit enjoying the relief from the sun until around 5 when we decided it was time to get dinner. We again drove up to the ghost town hoping for a couple of things; first, we wanted to eat at the restaraunt there, and second, we wanted to look around when there were hopefully fewer people and it was cooling off for the day. We got there to find that the restaraunt closed at 5, and it was still hot, though there were fewer people. We decided to just dive down to a Jack in the Box we had seen earlier for dinner. The nice air-conditioned environment of the Jack in the Box made us want to stay there all night long, but we ate our food and headed back to the bunk house.
We hung around the bunk house for the rest of the evening; enjoying the cooling air around sunset. There was some nice color to the hills around us, and we got a glimpse of the gibbous moon rising from the east as the sun set to the west.
We watched until it was dark out and were disappointed that there were not that many stars. I got up in the night a couple of times, but still did not see the massive crowding of stars I had hoped to see. We were far enough away from most towns that I hoped to see the nice dark sky stars that I remembered from Yellowstone. It wasn't much more spectacular than what we see in San Jose, though.
Day 2
After a restless night of sleep, we got up around 7:30 AM to pack up. We drove up to the ghost town one last time. This time we were pleased to find nobody around, and the temperatures had not yet started to get unbearably hot. I took a roll of 36 exposure B&W, before we turned in the key to the bunk house and headed on our way to Vegas.
The 2 1/2 hour drive to Vegas was pretty uneventful. The road was mostly desert, skirting the N edge of Mohave National Preserve. We went through our third and final pass just before the border of Nevada. Not far from Vegas, we hit a couple stretches of construction. It was frustrating having to slow down to 55 so close to our goal, but we finally made it to the Excalibur.
As soon as we walked in, we were greeted by what would become all too familiar over the next few days; people giving comps. We were brought over to talk to this guy who wanted to give us tickets to the Tournament of Kings, free nights hotel on our next trip, and a number of other things. All we had to do was to take a look at their new premiere condo timeshares. It sounded like a good deal, but we were tired, wanted to check in, and didn't want to go look at something that we knew we would never purchase. So we gave him that old stand-by exuse that, "We'd think about it and get back to hom." The people giving comps were relentless and hounded us for our entire stay. Don't get me wrong, I like free stuff. But don't hound me about it when we've got other plans!
After excusing ourselves from the comps guy, we got checked in and went up to our room. We were already enjoying the A/C of the hotel, but when we walked into our room, we collapsed on the king-sized bed for a few minutes. This was so much better than camping in the desert.
After relaxing a few minutes, we gave Steve and Nancy a call. They had flown in the night before and were staying at the Mirage. We all decided to meet down by the ticket counter to buy tickets for the Tournament of Kings that evening. Once we got tickets, Steve and Nancy headed back to the Mirage to switch rooms, and we went to unpack and get some lunch.
We brought lunch back to our room and mostly just lay around watching TV and resting up. Before we were supposed to meet Steve and Nancy, we went down to the casino and played the slots a bit. Val won $50 with the first $1 she put in. After that we cashed out and found Steve and Nancy waiting for us.
We found our seats in the Tournament of Kings and found that we were sitting in the Dragon section. The show takes place in this big arena, divided up into different countries. Each section has to cheer for their king and jeer the other kings. The outsider is the Dragon, who isn't invited to the tournament, but shows up later to kill the king. The show can be lots of fun when you have people cheering and booing in your section. We didn't have quite as much of that as I would have liked, but the show was still pretty fun.
After the show, we walked over to the Luxor a bit before Steve and Nancy decided to walk back to their hotel. We were still pretty tired, so we played the penny and nickle slots for a bit before heading back to bed. This time I was the winner with an $80 payout on one of the penny machines.
Day 3
The next day, we decide to meet Steve and Nancy at the wax museum in the Ventian at around 5:30 PM. That gave us some time to play some slots again, get lunch, and drive over to the Palms where Val's brother wanted us to pick him up a shirt from the Hart and Huntington tattoo parlor. I joked a bit about getting tattoos there to make him jealous, but the crowd of people waiting there made me want to get out as soon as possible.
We headed back to the hotel and hung out some more until around 4:30, when we walked over to the MGM to take the monorail up to Harrah's. MGM was huge and we walked through it for 15 minutes before finally getting to the monorail. We bought 2 1-way tickets for $5 each, and headed for the Harrah's station. Once there, we had to try and find our way out to the strip to get over to the Venetian. We somehow ended up in a back alleyway. There were garbage dumpsters and broken glass on the ground, and it made me a bit nervous to be carrying around expensive camera equipment. We eventually managed to get find the Venetian where Steve and Nancy were already waiting for us.
The wax museum itself was pretty cool, and worth the $22/person. The wax statues were very lifelike, and a lot of detail was put into them. They were setup in a way that you could pose with some of your favorite stars. I pulled out my big flash for many of the photos there and tried to avoid the black shadow that a flash often causes. I think my most succesfull attempt was this one of tennis player Andre Agassi. The flash isn't quite as evident as many of my other shots, and the skin tones look pretty good.
About 3/4 of the way through the wax museum, there was a sort of funhouse. They take groups of 10 people at a time through it, and attempt to scare people as they make their way through it. It wasn't all that scary, but it did cause a few people to jump a few times.
When we were done at the wax museum, we walked through the Venetian a bit. The Venetian had an interesting design as it was made to look like you were outdoors in a small Italian city. The ceiling was painted to look like a blue sky, and the overall effect was pretty good.
Val and I sat and relaxed on a bench while Steve and Nancy went on a gondola ride. I tried to get a couple good pictures of them, but the lighting just wasn't that great. If I would have been thinking, I would have set my camera to ISO 800 or 1600 and probably could have gotten a good shot of them with just natural lighting, though. After the gondola ride, we got some food at the food court of the Venetian before walking back to our hotel.
By the time we were finished eating, the sun had set and it had started to cool off some. We stood outside for a bit before saying good-bye to Steve and Nancy and making our way back to the Excalibur. We hadn't seen much of this side of the strip on our last trip, so it was kind of nice to walk back. We got a few pictures of the volcano erupting at Treasure Island, but none that were very spectacular. You really would need a tripod and a clearer view than what we were able to get with all the people milling around.
The walk back became tortuous after awhile. Our feet were killing us from the last few days of walking. It was a huge relief when we walked into our hotel room and collapsed on the bed. We stayed there watching TV for the rest of the evening.
Day 4
We didn't do too much on our last full day in Vegas. We were still pretty tired so we hung out around the hotel, casino, and pool. We did walk over to the Luxor again to take some pictures as we didn't have our cameras with when we had gone over there before. Eventually we turned in early after losing some money in the slots. I think the slots knew that we were about to leave ahead as our luck seemed to have changed for the worse. We probably lost around $50 and figured that was enough. We still came away ahead with enough to cover most of what we spent on our meals and the wax museum, at least.
Day 5
By this time, we were ready to head home. We got up at 4:30 AM, checked out, loaded the truck, and were on the road by 5. The trip back was pretty uneventful. We came back the same way we went, so there was not much new that we saw. We stopped at Gilroy for lunch around 1 PM, and made it home a little after 2. The vacation was fun, but it felt good to be home again.
Before heading there, Val noticed on the map that there was a ghost town named Calico just off the road on our route to Vegas. That sounded interesting so we looked into it a bit more and found that they had a campsite, cabins, and a bunkhouse to rent. Our hotel was booked Tues-Thurs. night so I came up with the bright idea of leaving a day earlier than we originally had planned and camping out at Calico the night before.
Before we left, Val called to see if we needed to make reservations. She checked on the availability of the cabins and found that they were all booked, but the campsites were all open. We decided to pack the tent and camp out there.
Day 1
We woke up around 4:30 AM Mon. morning, and after packing, taking some time to wake up a little and checking the house, we hit the road around 5:15 AM. We took the 101 down to Gilroy, then headed east on 152 up through the Pacheco Pass. As we started up the pass I felt the familiar rumbling of my bowls that indicated I needed to stop somewhere soon to use the restroom. We still had 20 some miles before hitting I-5, so when I saw a visitor center I took the opportunity to stop. To my dismay, the visitor center itself was closed, but they had a couple of portable outhouses sitting in a parking area there.
When I walked into the outhouse, I seriously questioned if I needed to go that badly. It was nasty inside. Toilet paper hung from the seat, and the toilet itself was nearly overflowing. The rumble in my gut told me that it was nearing an emergency, so I decided I needed to suck it up and go about my business. I left there feeling dirty, but relieved. I feel sorry for the next person who had to go inside there to see what I added to the pile, though.
Before we hit the road again, we had to stop and admire the landscape. The spot we had pulled off overlooked a lake nestled in the hills. It was quite scenic, especially with the early morning light. We took a number of photos like this one before hitting the road.
We hit I-5 20-30 minutes later. We would take this for 120 some miles. Much of it reminded us of ND, except for the fact that we could see mountains on the horizon. And the almond tree fields we passed. And the vineyards. And the number of other crops we passed that would never grow in ND. A couple stretches of road looked like a brush fire had passed through in recent years. The ground was black, with patches of dry yellow grasses.
We drove along I-5 until we hit the turnoff for 46, though the town of Wasco. (Wascolly Wabbit! ) Just before hitting Wasco, we saw what I think was the state penitentiary. There were guard towers all along the fence around the excercise yard. I kind of wanted to stop and take a couple pictures, but thought better of it. It was a fair distance from the road, but I didn't want to risk being stopped and questioned about why I was taking pictures of the prison. They probably would have suspected me of trying to mastermind some huge prison break or something.
Once we hit 99, we turned south towards Bakersfield for 20 some miles. There we turned onto 58, gassed up and headed out on the next long stretch of road, and the last for the day. The part of Bakersfield we were able to see from the road made it look like kind of a run-down town. There were lots of run-down houses with grafiti on them, and it just didn't look like a generally nice place to live.
Highway 58 took us up through the 2nd of 3 passes we would need to go through; Tehachapi pass. It had some nice scenery and we pulled over at one spot to get a few photos. There were a number of places I would have liked to stop for pictures, but there was no good place to pull over so we had to be satisfied with what Val could take with the point & shoot while driving.
Just before reaching Barstow around noon, we crossed over the Mohave river. It would have made a great photo op because the river itself was dry, so it was basically a river of sand. There was again no good place to pull over, though so we continued on to Barstow, where we switched roads to I-15, the final road that would bring us to Vegas.
Before leaving Barstow, we stopped at a Popeye's for lunch. In the same little parking area they had an interesting looking strip mall with a couple of fast food places, gift shops, etc. After lunch, I snapped a couple pictures and we headed towards Calico, where we planned to spend the night.
We arrived at Calico and were told we could just pick out a camping spot, and a ranger would be buy to collect the camping fees. So we drove around both of the main sites. Both were deserted at the time. Not a single person there. The roads were extremely rocky, and I found myself hoping that they wouldn't puncture the tires of the Trailblazer. We drove around both campsites and decided on one away from the cabins. These all had hookups, but we decided to spend the extra $4 for a bit nicer campsite location.
Once we had decided on a campsite location, the fun began. I pulled out the tent, ran the poles through it and got it mostly up. The tent we have will stand on its own, but only barely. It's got the standard dome-style tent poles in the middle, then 2 more poles on the sides. To really stand nicely it needs to be staked down. That's where our first problem came in. The ground was essentially rock and our tent stakes were plastic. We had forgotten to bring a hammer, so I grabbed a big rock and tried to pound the stakes into the ground. It wasn't working well at all. We tried weighting down the corners of the tent with rocks, both inside and outside. It would work for a while until a wind gust would come up. On top of that, it was 110 out, the only shade we had was from the open back of the truck, and carrying around big rocks trying to get the tent to stand nicely was exhausting us.
We got the tent to stand up a bit, then got in the truck and drove up to the ghost town. There we sat in the air conditioned truck for about 10 min, before we got out to look around the town. There were quite a few people wandering around getting in the way of pictures, and the heat soon became unbearable again. We went back to the truck and drove down to a convenience store to get some ice.
When we got back to the tent we found that the sides of the tent had fallen in again. We decided to see if the bunk house was still available. The people at the park office thought we were crazy to spend $60 on the bunk house for only 2 people, but it was worth it. It had a small air conditioner and got us out of the sun. There were 10 bunk beds, for a total of 20 beds, but the matresses didn't look very comfortable so we decided to bring our air matress in to sleep on. While hanging out around the bunk house, I was able to get this photo of one of the dust devils that kept popping up not too far from us.
We hung out at the bunk house for a bit enjoying the relief from the sun until around 5 when we decided it was time to get dinner. We again drove up to the ghost town hoping for a couple of things; first, we wanted to eat at the restaraunt there, and second, we wanted to look around when there were hopefully fewer people and it was cooling off for the day. We got there to find that the restaraunt closed at 5, and it was still hot, though there were fewer people. We decided to just dive down to a Jack in the Box we had seen earlier for dinner. The nice air-conditioned environment of the Jack in the Box made us want to stay there all night long, but we ate our food and headed back to the bunk house.
We hung around the bunk house for the rest of the evening; enjoying the cooling air around sunset. There was some nice color to the hills around us, and we got a glimpse of the gibbous moon rising from the east as the sun set to the west.
We watched until it was dark out and were disappointed that there were not that many stars. I got up in the night a couple of times, but still did not see the massive crowding of stars I had hoped to see. We were far enough away from most towns that I hoped to see the nice dark sky stars that I remembered from Yellowstone. It wasn't much more spectacular than what we see in San Jose, though.
Day 2
After a restless night of sleep, we got up around 7:30 AM to pack up. We drove up to the ghost town one last time. This time we were pleased to find nobody around, and the temperatures had not yet started to get unbearably hot. I took a roll of 36 exposure B&W, before we turned in the key to the bunk house and headed on our way to Vegas.
The 2 1/2 hour drive to Vegas was pretty uneventful. The road was mostly desert, skirting the N edge of Mohave National Preserve. We went through our third and final pass just before the border of Nevada. Not far from Vegas, we hit a couple stretches of construction. It was frustrating having to slow down to 55 so close to our goal, but we finally made it to the Excalibur.
As soon as we walked in, we were greeted by what would become all too familiar over the next few days; people giving comps. We were brought over to talk to this guy who wanted to give us tickets to the Tournament of Kings, free nights hotel on our next trip, and a number of other things. All we had to do was to take a look at their new premiere condo timeshares. It sounded like a good deal, but we were tired, wanted to check in, and didn't want to go look at something that we knew we would never purchase. So we gave him that old stand-by exuse that, "We'd think about it and get back to hom." The people giving comps were relentless and hounded us for our entire stay. Don't get me wrong, I like free stuff. But don't hound me about it when we've got other plans!
After excusing ourselves from the comps guy, we got checked in and went up to our room. We were already enjoying the A/C of the hotel, but when we walked into our room, we collapsed on the king-sized bed for a few minutes. This was so much better than camping in the desert.
After relaxing a few minutes, we gave Steve and Nancy a call. They had flown in the night before and were staying at the Mirage. We all decided to meet down by the ticket counter to buy tickets for the Tournament of Kings that evening. Once we got tickets, Steve and Nancy headed back to the Mirage to switch rooms, and we went to unpack and get some lunch.
We brought lunch back to our room and mostly just lay around watching TV and resting up. Before we were supposed to meet Steve and Nancy, we went down to the casino and played the slots a bit. Val won $50 with the first $1 she put in. After that we cashed out and found Steve and Nancy waiting for us.
We found our seats in the Tournament of Kings and found that we were sitting in the Dragon section. The show takes place in this big arena, divided up into different countries. Each section has to cheer for their king and jeer the other kings. The outsider is the Dragon, who isn't invited to the tournament, but shows up later to kill the king. The show can be lots of fun when you have people cheering and booing in your section. We didn't have quite as much of that as I would have liked, but the show was still pretty fun.
After the show, we walked over to the Luxor a bit before Steve and Nancy decided to walk back to their hotel. We were still pretty tired, so we played the penny and nickle slots for a bit before heading back to bed. This time I was the winner with an $80 payout on one of the penny machines.
Day 3
The next day, we decide to meet Steve and Nancy at the wax museum in the Ventian at around 5:30 PM. That gave us some time to play some slots again, get lunch, and drive over to the Palms where Val's brother wanted us to pick him up a shirt from the Hart and Huntington tattoo parlor. I joked a bit about getting tattoos there to make him jealous, but the crowd of people waiting there made me want to get out as soon as possible.
We headed back to the hotel and hung out some more until around 4:30, when we walked over to the MGM to take the monorail up to Harrah's. MGM was huge and we walked through it for 15 minutes before finally getting to the monorail. We bought 2 1-way tickets for $5 each, and headed for the Harrah's station. Once there, we had to try and find our way out to the strip to get over to the Venetian. We somehow ended up in a back alleyway. There were garbage dumpsters and broken glass on the ground, and it made me a bit nervous to be carrying around expensive camera equipment. We eventually managed to get find the Venetian where Steve and Nancy were already waiting for us.
The wax museum itself was pretty cool, and worth the $22/person. The wax statues were very lifelike, and a lot of detail was put into them. They were setup in a way that you could pose with some of your favorite stars. I pulled out my big flash for many of the photos there and tried to avoid the black shadow that a flash often causes. I think my most succesfull attempt was this one of tennis player Andre Agassi. The flash isn't quite as evident as many of my other shots, and the skin tones look pretty good.
About 3/4 of the way through the wax museum, there was a sort of funhouse. They take groups of 10 people at a time through it, and attempt to scare people as they make their way through it. It wasn't all that scary, but it did cause a few people to jump a few times.
When we were done at the wax museum, we walked through the Venetian a bit. The Venetian had an interesting design as it was made to look like you were outdoors in a small Italian city. The ceiling was painted to look like a blue sky, and the overall effect was pretty good.
Val and I sat and relaxed on a bench while Steve and Nancy went on a gondola ride. I tried to get a couple good pictures of them, but the lighting just wasn't that great. If I would have been thinking, I would have set my camera to ISO 800 or 1600 and probably could have gotten a good shot of them with just natural lighting, though. After the gondola ride, we got some food at the food court of the Venetian before walking back to our hotel.
By the time we were finished eating, the sun had set and it had started to cool off some. We stood outside for a bit before saying good-bye to Steve and Nancy and making our way back to the Excalibur. We hadn't seen much of this side of the strip on our last trip, so it was kind of nice to walk back. We got a few pictures of the volcano erupting at Treasure Island, but none that were very spectacular. You really would need a tripod and a clearer view than what we were able to get with all the people milling around.
The walk back became tortuous after awhile. Our feet were killing us from the last few days of walking. It was a huge relief when we walked into our hotel room and collapsed on the bed. We stayed there watching TV for the rest of the evening.
Day 4
We didn't do too much on our last full day in Vegas. We were still pretty tired so we hung out around the hotel, casino, and pool. We did walk over to the Luxor again to take some pictures as we didn't have our cameras with when we had gone over there before. Eventually we turned in early after losing some money in the slots. I think the slots knew that we were about to leave ahead as our luck seemed to have changed for the worse. We probably lost around $50 and figured that was enough. We still came away ahead with enough to cover most of what we spent on our meals and the wax museum, at least.
Day 5
By this time, we were ready to head home. We got up at 4:30 AM, checked out, loaded the truck, and were on the road by 5. The trip back was pretty uneventful. We came back the same way we went, so there was not much new that we saw. We stopped at Gilroy for lunch around 1 PM, and made it home a little after 2. The vacation was fun, but it felt good to be home again.