Holy Heatwave...

We wake up early to make sure we are first in line at TNT. Pull in just as another couple with a splitty and conversation ensues.

We do finally make it to the counter and check E in. Begrudgingly, we also decide to have james and his team give us a tuneup at the same time. It's not that we are against the tune up - but we had committed to ourselves that this one we wold do ourselves. Somehow, the last few years of living in a condo and no garage didn't provide the environment for teaching ourselves these fine arts and we have been looking forward to getting our hands dirty...but the heat of Kingman trumped all.

We also had the team check our ground and some other electrical issues, the timing, which some have said may be causing our hesitation/lag in 1st and had them seal a few of the holes into the engine compartment to get a better vacuum (= better cooling). We sit and plan our course to the beach and talk to locals about how hot it will be this week, and how Kingman is apparently the comfortable cool spot in the region (subtle foreshadowing) 2pm and E gets a clean bill of health. After all the reading I'd done on the samba I wasn't very excited to put a relay in, but after push starting our way across the country (and now hearing E start perfectly) I caved willingly. I can now happily say (at least thus far ) that the pushstart on the way to the shop was our last.

We grabbed another burger at the diner, realized hat the habit of parking in the highest spot with the biggest runway dies hard, and hit the road excited to be out of kingman and headed for cooler temps. We go impossibly slow in the heat and its impossibly hot. At one point we realize the we have to close all the windows because the wind actually feels like its burning us. We stop to fuel up and jen buys a bag of ice to chill some of our water and so that we can dip rags in to drape over ourselves and karma in an attempt to keep our blood from boiling (we assume this is how modern a/c was invented)...but also shudder at how fast an entire bag of ice can melt.

We make it less than an hour down the road before toying with high temps and realizing that we are headed for some incline ahead. Jen picks an exit for us to "pull over and cool down" and we laugh at the irony that the exit happens to read "needles/Mohave desert". We try to find some shade near the park and end up pulling under a vacant awning beside a golf course where we see the temp read 118 in the shade. I take back all my complaints about the heat in the south and my misguided beliefs that dry heat wasn't so bad. This was nothing short of miserable.

We wait the heat out until about 6pm, talk about how cool 110 feels and get underway. We ended up driving most of the night just to make it into the hills of California (our first time on the trip driving at night since its our first day with functioning taillights) and decent temps before finding the nearest parking lot to stealth camp in for a few hours. That's a day we will neither miss nor want to live gain.