The Bottom Of North America

We drove through Death Valley and arrived at Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America.

It was barren and hot!
112F!
As I said before, we haven't been there for many years, so all the new boardwalks and bathrooms were a surprise to us.
But it's still the salty bottoms that it has always been.

And for the first time we have ever seen it, Badwater Basin actually had bad water in it!!!

Here is Michael pointing to the sea level sign. As you can see, we are well below it.

And of course, we couldn't leave without taking one of our classic "selfies." :)
Man!, it was hot!!!!

Death Valley Treasures

We haven't been to Death Valley for many years, and this visit was in the late spring, so we found a lot of blooming plants....mostly close to the desert floor (for obvious reasons)

I tried to find the names of them, but I'm stumped on a couple.

I'll keep searching, unless you can help?

Desert Five Spot

Desert Gold

Damn Dam

Our journey led us away from the Grand Canyon and toward Death Valley.

And the road between those places crosses over Hoover Dam.

Traffic was crazy because every car had to go through a security check point. Driving in from the Arizona side was better than driving in from Las Vegas. Those people had a 7 mile line!


This is the old water line staining the walls of the canyon.

This is a new bypass that they are building so vehicles don't have to cross the dam if they don't want to.. Basically it's a new freeway to handle all the traffic. It's weird that there would be that much travel through there.

This is one of our classic selfies revealing how we feel about the entire dam enterprise.

Of course, the dogs didn't mind the dam as they swam in Lake Mead!

Road to the Grand Canyon

So we took off from the wedding. The road out of the Blue River Area was beautiful.

Of course, we stopped along the way to let the dogs swim in a local reservoir.
And we did a little letterboxing as we went. This letterbox was held inside the bumper, by Michael's left hand, with a magnet. It was a kitschy motel from the 50's where you could stay in a teepee for the night.
And it had a collection of old-time cars parked around for effect.
Then we drove to the rim of the Grand Canyon. OMG! It's still just as breath-taking as it was 20 years ago!

A classic "selfie"

Whew!

Well, I have been horribly sick for more than 3 weeks!

When I went to the doctor, he tested me for N1H1, Mono, Strep ... anything he could test.

And it all came up negative.

So, that meant that I had a viral thing.

Crap.

I had to wait it out. And that turned out to be nearly 4 weeks!

I still have a bit of inflamed sensitivity in my lungs, but everything else has gone away.

No more headaches, painfully sore throat, coughing, sinusitis, dry throat, etc. Yay!

The additional bummer is that I couldn't do our crossfit workout the entire time I was sick, neither could Michael, who was fighting off the chance to get what I had.

And yesterday was the first time we went back to the gym.

Man! It's like the first time we ever worked out!

It sucks because we had made so much progress.

Now it feels like we are beginners with asthma!

And today we are SORE!!!

But the fun news is that we took about 5 days off to travel to Arizona for a wedding.

JJ and Nicole are dog-training friends of Michael's who met at one of his seminars, so they asked him to officiate their ceremony.

So we got Michael ordained on the internet (now we are both ordained ministers at the Universal Life Church) and headed to the Blue River Wilderness in SW Arizona to camp out

and marry them while standing in a river.

It was beautiful.

We spent two days there and three days driving home. We went to the Grand Canyon (where we honeymooned 20 years ago!), over the Hoover Dam, up through Death Valley, hiked around a swollen Mono Lake, and over Sonora Pass (since Tioga Pass was still closed). It was awesome!!!!

Now we are home again and we are back to our house hunting.