Who thought going home would be so much of a drama. There is zero public transport from Mammoth back to the clutches of civilization. The initial plan was for a friend of Bonnie's to hire a car from Reno to get to Mammoth, and I was going to take the car to LAX. That fell through when a storm blew in and closed Reno airport taking away both the option of an internal flight and car rental from there. Also, the lady who ran the local car rental branch spun out on ice on the way to work, and they wouldn't open for a few days. So no car rental there arrgh Out comes the cardboard, it was time to get down to the corner and start hitch hiking.

It was about minus 10, snowing and did I mention minus 10. Two hours later my fingers, toes and other unmentionables had gone through the shivering stage and out the other side. I wasn't getting much luck on the lift front, although I believe I was entertaining the masses as I got lots of thumbs up, big smiles and waves. Then a vision of beauty - a Honda civic doing a U-turn and pulling over. Abby, an LA local took pity on me and we headed south. As we left the snowy mountains behind picked up speed across planes. Unfortunetly, the storm causing the snow on the mountains was blowing over semis' and caused the state highway patrol to close large sections of the Mojave desert road adding another 2 hours to our journey. But the bad luck didn't end there, I was pointing out something in the desert causing Abby to glance over while a strong wind blew us into another car traveling down the highway. crash. Dragging our sorry butts into LA, we headed to the pub to drown some sorrows before crashing for the next days flight.