2011 Mount Whitney Trip With Joey-Sunday, 8/21

OK, I have been really bad at my blogging, but I am going to try and reform myself.

To finish up the trip report, Joey and I spent the night at the Dow Villa Motel in Lone Pine.

It is a really cool place, old time, lots of antiques and they have a pool!

After a quick breakfast at a local diner, we decided to go on the "Rock Fantasy" tour in the Alabama Hills.

The Alabama Hills are steeped in movie history. Anytime you see a commerical with mountains in the background, it was probably shot in the Alabama Hills. Old Western movies to Iron Man were shot here. Now everytime Joey sees them on TV, he says "there they are dad".

Anyway, they have a bunch of rock formations that look like creatures.

We started to do that and found about 10 of them, but we got bored.

Joey said, "Dad, where does that road lead?" and off we went on the road to Horseshoe Meadows.

I had never been up there before. The road is better than any rollercoaster ride (thank God certain nervous passengers weren't with us).

It leads up to Horseshoe Meadows which is a pretty cool place.

We hung out for a little while and then started our trek back to LA.

Going down 395 is always interesting, the crazy houses, the airplane graveyard and we stopped for Jerky and Pistacios.

The flight home ended up being an adventure. We missed our flight and they re-routed us to Dallas where we got to stay an extra night.

We were both glad to be home, but it was a great trip!

2011 Mount Whitney Trip With Joey-Friday, 8/19

I have not been keeping up my blogging duties!

Made my yearly trek to Mount Whitney, this year bringing Joey along.

We arrived in LA and hot footed it to Lone Pine to see if we could get a permit. While there were no overnight permits available for Friday, we got one for Saturday.

Our first stop after getting the permit was to get dinner and carb load. We stopped at the Pizza Factory and both of us got Spaghetti and Meatballs. Joey's verdict-"really good"

After food shopping and getting some odds and ends in Lone Pine, we made our way up to the portal to set up came for the night.

The obligatory "up the portal road shot"







We found a campsite in the walk in campground and set up camp for the night.

Our humble abode.

Weird Drive Home from DC

We left at 7:45 and made great time all the way. As we were approaching NC, we saw local and state troopers everywhere. At one exit, there were 6 state troopers lined up on an on-ramp ready to give chase. 5 miles down the road we saw another 3 troopers who had a truck pulled over with the driver hand cuffed and sprawled out on the hood of a car. We made good time anyway, 6 hours door to door.