We had planned a camping and mountain bike trip for this week. The state of my foot prevented both, so we rented a Ford Expedition and some hotel rooms and headed north, up highway 395.

On the first day, we stopped at Ridgecrest where we visited a local museum (bell ringing), stayed at a decent hotel with a great pool for John Michael, then proceeded north the following day.

That morning we stopped at the Fossil Falls, a volcanic area dotted with cinder cones and notable for this ancient and long-ago dried falls. It was quite beautiful, but by midday the temperature was already hitting 100F.

A bit further north we stopped at the Manzanar relocation camp where, after the Pearl Harbor attack, many American citizens of Japanese heritage were, essentially, imprisoned. This site has been very well restored and gives one a sense of the huge injustice of this action.