We were up around 6:00 am to a brisk wind, 53° and bright sun. This was cold enough to wear heavy warm clothes, including hats. It was a beautiful morning, however, with unusually clear views toward Death Valley. At 8:40 am we finished breakfast of pancakes and griddled knockwurst. It remained breezy through breakfast, but the wind died down a little afterwards. By 10:30 am we could remove our shirts and down our eye opener shots of Don Julio.

At 11:01 am we were ready to roll. 20 minutes later, just after driving out of that wash that caused us so much confusion on the way in, we stopped for 15 minutes admiring and playing with some cactuses, and extracting some needles out of my sandals. At 11:53 am, just before the park/Nevada border, we stopped for an hour and a half, to the day’s second (and trip’s last) round of Frisbee in a very nice, flat open area. (I don’t recall when the first one was.) We had an unusually long game, which ended only after Bobby took an “interesting” fall on his back. He had a plastic bottle of leftover Don Julio in his pocket that cracked but only leaked slowly, so we were forced to drink it, about a shot apiece. As we were getting ready to leave, and handing out what we thought would be one more round of beers, we were aghast to find that we only had two left. We should have had one more six pack, dammit, to get us all the way to the highway. Yet another Greenshit trip running out of beer!

Continuing our drive into Nevada at 1:23 pm, in 10 minutes we reached the intersection with the road from Lees Camp that we originally came from. We went past that intersection, across a portion of the Amargosa Desert toward the paved highway, U.S. 95, 7.4 miles away. At 2:01 pm, when we saw the highway ahead that would mark the end of our off-road experience, we stopped a few feet short of the highway to prepare for civilization: our last pee on the road, reinserting the sway bar, and putting on shirts and seat belts.

When replacing the sway bar I was reminded that I had removed the washer that went between the sway bar end and the cotter pin, but I could not remember where I put it. I had no choice but to replace the sway bar without the washer, hoping the cotter pin alone was sufficient to hold it. Then, when we got out the baggie of hand cleaner and unfolded the paper towel inside of it, the washer fell right out of it! Yes, a clever storage spot for that washer. So I removed the cotter pin and put the washer back in place, and in a few minutes we were all set to get on the highway.

Unfortunately there was a drainage gully and fairly high berm still to negotiate just before the pavement, the type you typically see alongside desert highways. Driving over the berm on an angle, one of my front wheels went so far up in the air, Joey and Bobby behind me thought I was going to flip over. It all happened so fast I hardly knew what was happening. Had I left the sway bar detached, this would not have happened. Imagine how embarrassing, to tip the jeep over at the end of a week in the desert, 6 feet from the highway!

At 2:28 pm we started driving down U.S. 95, attempting to stay under 50 mph until we found a gas station to air up the tires. A half hour later we reached the intersection with Nevada 373 at a spot (not really a town) called Leeland with a gas station or two. Alas, we didn’t need gas and they had no air. However the inter-section also had a fireworks store with a 25' tall silo topped by a green tower painted bright red to look like the world’s biggest firecracker. They also had the Cherry Patch Ranch 2, a legal house of prostitution (open 24 hours, Visa and MasterCard accepted).

After a 10-minute stop in a this outpost we kept driving down Nevada 373, still under 50 mph, which became highway 127 as it reentered California. It was a wonderful drive through fantastic desert scenery, and a fine way to end the trip. At 4:11 pm, 67 miles after we first got on the highway, we finally found a place to get air at Shoshone, California (you had to ask for the air hose which they kept behind the counter). But our main, awful, job here was to empty the two 5-gallon gas cans from each jeep, made unreasonably difficult by bad pour spouts not very compatible with the jeep filler necks. The whole stop here took almost an hour, but at least, for once, nobody poured gasoline on themselves.

Finally at 5:05 pm we were able to start driving at more reasonable highway speeds, although my jeep still often had trouble maintaining over 60 mph on the grades. In Barstow around 7:25 pm we decided to eat, and tried to find a restaurant that Joey knew about called called Coco’s. Due to some wrong turns and faulty memory, it took us 18 minutes to find the place. Dinner was pretty good and we were back on the highway in an hour, at 8:39 pm.

The next 2+ hours and 127 miles were long and uneventful. We arrived at Joey’s house at 10:57 pm. There we had a jacuzzi and beer and went to bed about an hour later.