Windy Trip

Danny and Allison take a trip to Death Valley CA to practice their travel survival skills. However, they come back with more then that. A new purpose and a great idea called "The Giving. Tree".

Danny's Story:
Allison and I took a trip to Death Valley.  We prepared for a couple nights camping and imagined we were on the road for our American Tour that we have been preparing for.

We initially lost internet connection deep in the Mojave Desert. Our maps app stopped working.  We backtracked till we got our internet connection back and realized we didn't have a place to camp and couldn't find a camp ground.

8 hours after we departed from Fresno we found a dusty vacant road off the freeway in the middle of California.
We get out of our car and it was windy.
Too windy.
Allison and I set up our tent in 10 minutes in the dead of night with our flashlights and cooperation.
We are starting to realize teamwork is one of the keys we are going to need to have success on our American Tour.
We load the sleeping bags, blankets and dogs into the tent and call it a night at 3:30am.

At 6:30am the wind is blowing the tent so hard it's impossible to sleep.
It doesn't look like the $30 tent can cut it.
We take down and pack up our tent and hit the road before 7am and head to Death Valley.
We realized when we were driving the same roads we were lost on a couple hours earlier and we were driving by campgrounds.  A lot of campgrounds at that.
We stopped to check em out and see if they would do for our campsite for our trip.
It was just too damn windy.  We wouldn't be able to make a fire, sit and talk, anything really.  We were in the middle of a wind storm.

We get back on track and found a town with internet and plugged back into our maps app.  One road would lead us into Death Valley from the town we were at.
We were about 100 miles from our destination.

As we drove into Death Valley we hit a Road Closed sign.
We got out of the car to take a break and stretch our legs.  I mean, it's not like anyone is going to be bothered we stopped at a dead end in the middle of the desert.
Yeah.. Then a guy drove out of the "Closed Road" in a white van and said "I wouldn't go that way if I were you".  Creepy, right!?  Yeah we thought so too.

We backtracked a mile to a road we initially saw and went down it.  It was perfect.  Isolated. deserted.
The winds were behaving a bit different in the Valley and it was bearable to set up camp.
We strategically placed our tent and built our fireplace to block the wind.
Our trip had begun.
So did the wind storm.

We managed to do our thing in the Valley till 6pm.  We had to call it quits.  We were tired, dusty and found what we were looking for in the trip.