"Play 'Wheels on the Bus' and get the hell out of my sight."

Posted by Chuck at 9/1/2008 7:30 PM
Categories: Travel
In an effort to avoid being willfully obtuse, I'll explain that this entry's title is from the tv show The Family Guy. While Lois is loading everyone into the car for a road trip:

Stewie: What the hell do you think you're doing!?
Lois: Strapping you in, honey, so you don't get hurt.
Stewie: "So I don't get hurt;" that's the best you can come up with, you dull-witted termagant?
Lois: I brought your Raffi tape!
Stewie: Play "Wheels on the Bus" and get the hell out of my sight.

It's a little like loading Kelly and Janet into the car for a day trip. Just provide some sweet snacks and a few Vitamin Waters and they quit complaining.

A week ago last Saturday, Scott and Janet took us up north of here (Palmdale, CA) to the beginning of the Sierra Nevadas. It was essentially the other (east) side of the mountains from where JJ, Jesse, and I went to see the Giant Sequoias.  





We went to Whitney Portal, which to my dismay had nothing to do with Whitney Port, the only character from The Hills with an education and some work ethic, but is the start-off point for a hiking expedition up to Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the lower 48 states. We by no means went on that expedition, because why would you when just above the parking lot is this?











The pines were big, but no Giant Sequoias. Still really big though.

There was a fishing pond up there too.



After that, we went down to the Manzanar Japanese Internment Camp. Obviously, a representative of one of the darkest stains on US history, where over 110,000 people, most of them native-born US citizens with as little as 1/16th Japanese ancestry, were imprisoned during WWII.



The entrance buildings are pretty ominous.

Then the roads through the camp, where all the buildings have been removed, only the trees and some of the empty ponds in the elaborate gardens that the prisoners built to try to beautify this bleak place.



143 prisoners died here. Most were moved to better places to spend eternity after the war, but a few remain in the cemetery.



People have left the dead some objects and money for the after world.



Each of the camps were designed to be self-sufficient, a fact that seems improbable here in the late summer heat and parched earth. But back then, LA had yet to steal all the water from the Owens Valley.

On the way back to Palmdale, we stopped at Fossil Falls, a place unlike anything you've ever seen. It formed from lava and water flows.



The lava blocked the path of glacial melt waters over a few ice ages, which polished the basalt sooth, created a gorge complete with perfectly round potholes. 









We got on the road at 7:00 and were back by 4:30, including a long lunch, so it's a pretty easy day trip.

 
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