The day finally came. Last Wednesday I completed the sale of my business and became fully retired. After 44 years it was time to put the business in the hands of a younger generation and move on with our retirement. Thursday was our first day and we took the Jeep and headed out for a nice hike to a place called Rainbow Gardens. I hope this is not a metaphor for retirement in general because while we did get in a decent hike there was no rainbow. I suppose we should have known. After all this is the Mojave Desert.
Our "hiking trail" also turned out to be a Jeep road. That is fine, we like taking the Jeep into the desert however we were hoping for a real hiking trail, what we got was a road. We eventually parked the Jeep about half way to our goal and then hiked the road the rest of the way which gave us a decent workout. The only other living souls we encountered on the whole trip was whoever was in the helicopters that were flying over the area on their routes back to Las Vegas. Having a whole road to yourself makes for a big, wide hiking trail. There were certainly no trees to climb over that had fallen across the trail and no moss to slip on.
The pictures do not really provide good scale so it is hard to appreciate the distance that they cover or the size of the geographical formations. I also only took my cheap point and shoot camera so had limited ability to zoom and format. We were in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area and on the way back we spotted some much more colorful formations worthy of a tripod shot with the good camera. That will be a future trip.
In summary we got a lot of solitude, a good hike on a nice, almost too warm day, and some views that were worth the effort and some future exploration. Our hiking boots got some exercise too. All in all we are grateful that we could start our real, actual, retirement in this way and not in wheelchairs.
Click on any picture for a larger view.
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| Always interesting to see earth that is just pushed up as if by a giant mole. |
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| N 36 9.279 W 114 56.422 |
