Cold Night and Exploring Around Bishop Headed South to Quartzite

Tuesday February 11, 2020 Essex Rd. Camp CA.

To Bishop

Cold night

Last night I woke up around 3:30. My face was real cold as it was cold outside and inside the van too. I had some stuff in the van that wouldn’t do well to freeze so I got up and got the propane heater going. I looked outside at the temp gauge. It read 20 degrees F. Cold.

The little propane heater, a Wave 3 unit just wasn’t cutting it. I put my wok on the stove top burner and put a small fan blowing into that to keep it from getting red. The wok was more rusty than oily so there wasn’t too much smoke. That helped a lot but now I  had to be concerned about having enough oxygen in the van so I had to open the door for abut 30 seconds every fifteen minutes or so. After about an hour the temp was up to 70 so I turned things off and crawled back into bed and woke around 9 to get it going.

Driving in my jammies

I had my sweats on so I put on my slippers and got behind the wheel and drove South  on 395. I wanted to get out of that spot as last night when I drove in to it the mud was thick and well, muddy. This morning it was still frozen up so a good time to get out of there before the sun warmed things up and it was mud again.

Breakfast

I drove two hours or so down to Bishop. Well, just above Bishop I pulled over in a spot just off the road and washed up and had breakfast and got ready for the day.

Exploring Bishop

From there I drove into Bishop and tried to find the road I wanted to check out some water areas just to the southeast of town. But try as I might I kept getting lost in the towns back streets.

When I found myself driving north out of town on 395 thinking it was going south, I realized this is big country and I’m going to have to take more time to explore in this area. Right now I’m headed for Quartzite but I’ll return on the way back home and see what I can find. And anyway the dirt roads I wanted to check out are likely muddy right now so later might be better.

Headed south to camp Essex

So I got headed the right direction and left town headed to a camp spot I have on highway 40 at the Essex turnoff which is almost to Nettles. That way I don’t have to drive far tomorrow to get to Quartzite.

I had to drive in the dark for abut 3 hours and now I’m settled into a peaceful camp spot not too far from the highway which I can see but can’t hear.

Parker, next day

That’s it for a nice day exploring around.

I made it to Parker and am posting this in the Wal-Mart parking lot. Only another hour to quartzite