After visiting the Zion National Park we headed to the Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada. Finally we were able to get rid of our warm clothes for the rest of our trip, because it was about to get really really warm, which I liked. Since the Atlatl Campground is a “first come first serve” campground, we wanted to be there early. But driving from Zion it is quite a stretch. That’s why we decided to stop at the Sand Hollow State Park:
This Campground is next to a artificial lake. Let’s just say, I wouldn’t stay there again another night. This lake smelled so bad, so that I had to get my Yankee candles out as soon as I could and hold them in front of my face. They also warn about swimmers itch. A rash that you can develop because of swimming in the lake. Thank God we only stayed there for a night. The next day we left for The Valley of Fire State Park, where we stayed for 2 nights. We arrived at the campground around 11 am. (Luckily Nevada doesn’t have the daylight saving time, which meant we got one hour back.) When we arrived the campground was almost empty, so we chose the nicest site.
In the afternoon we wanted to do our first hike. The park is smaller than the ones we’ve been before which meant they didn’t have any shuttle buses. So we had to take our RV and drive to the hiking trails ourselves. This would have been way more comfortable with a car, but since we only had our RV we had to do it this way. The first thing I wanted to see was the famous fire wave.
The trail was quite nice. At the beginning you walk through sand and later on the rocks itself. Luckily it was a little bit cloudy. Cause having 30 degrees and no shade would be no fun at all. On our way back Nate got to walk for a bit. You can imagine how much fun he had walking in the sand. We even put Noam in the sand. He was really fascinated by it.
The next morning we got up early to take another hike. It was so hot, but we didn’t care cause we didn’t want to sit in our RV all day long. At the beginning of the white domes trail it was mostly sandy and rocky. After that the narrows came and we had to hike back up again. In this area a lot of movies have been filmed. You can still see the remains of a movie set that has been left there.
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Around noon it was way too hot. It was at least 35 degrees outside. We did a small picknick in our RV, drove the Fire Canyon Road and than to Mouse’s Tank.
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Even in the afternoon the heat was unbearable. But we still did a little bit of hiking. Totally sweaty we arrived at the Campground. Fortunately we had big showers for free there, were the 4 of us immediately went after we arrived at the campground. Micha took a couple of pictures in the evening were he met another family who also spent their parental leave in the US. There are more people doing something like this than we thought.
Here’s another crazy story: Like you already know we see a few crazy people here. Yesterday we got new neighbors. I called them “The hippies”. Right after they got here, they turned up their music (no, they had no good taste). It was so loud that even the last squirrel in his hole could hear it. I thought let’s see what will happen at 10pm (quiet hours). Nothing happened! 😖Which meant we had music almost all through the night. (The rocks surrounding us didn’t make it any better.)
When they got out of their RV in the morning I had to stop myself from laughing out loud: She was wearing only hot pants, a sports bra and a huge beach hat. And she was carrying two big umbrellas 😳(we had 30°C in the shade and no clouds in sight). We were asking ourselves why on earth they brought their umbrellas. Shortly thereafter we had our answer: We saw them walking through the rocks surrounding our campground with the umbrellas held high above their heads 😂 as a (additional, they were already wearing hats) protection against the sun. Who knew that a common umbrella, usually for rain, could also be used like that. It was bizarre and funny at the same time. Of course we had to document that:
