Flashback: last week in LA

Rewind, rewind, rewind...

It's Friday and as Steve and I were running some errands he gets a phone call from Tamara. One hour later Tamara and  I were already sitting in the car on our way to the Sierra Nevada Mountains...
We had planned to see the Sequoia National Park and its giant trees and drive back the next day, so I would have enough time to pack my stuff (since I was leaving Monday morning)and it was already dark when we got there and we didn't have a place to sleep yet. While drinking wine and some fruit juice at the bar of a lodge, we decided to find a camping site and just sleep in the car. Did I say "sleep"? Well, wrong word...I would rather say "being freaking cold and awake the whole night"!! We didn't plan on sleeping in the car and therefore didn't bring any blankets or other camping equipment ;) So that was a pretty terrible night...
Oh, forgot one good thing: we were able to see the sky pretty clear while laying in the car. I saw three shooting stars and the Milky Way :)
After this awesome night we had a very yummy breakfast -with HOT coffee- in the lodge we had our drinks the night before. After a couple cups of coffee I slowly woke up and we hit the road again to see "Mr. Sherman" and his pans "the general grant trees". The Sherman tree is by its volume the largest living tree on earth, is about 2,300-2,700 years old and  has a circumference (Umfang) of 31 meters! It's unbelievable when you stand right next to it.
Here is a picture:

May I introduce: "General Sherman"

The following hours I saw deers standing right next to me, chipmunks and a baby bear. The bear was sooo close to all of us and ran right over the walking path. I was really glad that I didn't see his mom ;)

little baby bear right in the middle

Definitely not very shy...deer right next to the car

 

Because Tamara and I are very spontaneous and always down for another adventure, we decided to drive up to Lake Tahoe and stay another night in the Mountains. The drive took us longer then we thought, so we got there at night and didn't have a place to sleep again. Since it was a Holiday weekend (Labour day), the lake was crowded and we finally gave up trying to find a place to sleep after we saw a lot of cars already pulling over and sleep in their car. We found a hotel, which had guests, who didn't show up. But we had to wait until two in the morning and still pay $160. The hotel was really nice though...
This is the hotel we stayed...      

Well, at least we stayed by the hotel in its parking lot :D

The second night in the car wasn't too bad. This time I slept on the back seats instead of the trunk and put more clothes on^^ We even had coffee in the morning when we went to the hotels restrooms to change and brush our teeth. We just pretended to be hotel guests and helped ourselves at the breakfast buffet. Haha! Tamara did better than me...she also got an apple at the hotel reception ;)

New awesome advice--> If you are on the road and can't find a place to sleep: The best place to sleep in a car is the parking lot of nice hotel. Quote of Tamara: " The people there are just too polite to say anything!" :D

Okay, back to Lake Tahoe: It's the third deepest alpine lake in the US. It's really beautiful...the water is very clear and the little town around it is very cute. Unfortunatly we couldn't stay that long and spent just a few hours driving around it and take some nice pictures.

 

 

 

this is how clear the water was

 

Lake Tahoe

Lake Tahoe again

Our way home was about 8 hours long but we took the road on the Nevada side of the Mountains, so one more state of the US I can cross off ;) We drove through lots of indian reservations and cute little towns. We saw a wildfire in the Mountains, which had been going since three days...the whole sky was full of smoke and when the sun set it looked really awesome. I didn't take a picture though. Sorry!
We arrived home at 10pm. The first thing I did was taking a shower...I never felt so gross after three days without a real bad or bathroom. After that I packed all my stuff and went to bed.
My flight to Santiago the next morning was at 1pm. After a 4 hour flight to Mexico city, I had three hours waiting time until my next flight to Santiago. At least I thought I had three hours;) In reality I only had two and ended up being paged (ausgerufen) by the flight crew and almost missing my flight :D After all that stress the 7 hour flight to Santiago was relaxing and not bad at all.
Everything went surprisingly good...my suitcase was there and Ralf, with whom I'm staying with, picked me up right in time.

That's all for now...

Bye bye :)