We were going to go straight home from Las Vegas. Mom thought it would be nice to have a day to clean out the Covered Wagon, wash the shirt she had been wearing for half a week, and then wash herself. I was ready for a long nap in my Mom-watching chair. But then there was a car party on the freeway leaving Nevada. For more than an hour all the cars lined up in a slow-motion conga line, blocking the way to California. The party broke up as soon as we crossed into California, but the damage had been done. While we were waiting, Mom had seen a sign pointing the way to the empty desert, which made her remember that there were dooms somewhere around here. So she had asked The Witch how to get there, and it turned out that they were only about 100 miles away. The exit to the dooms was only 5 miles into California, and Mom had to pull off to go potty anyway.
But The Witch had another trap in store for us. As soon as we turned around, she told us about a secret shortcut. “There is another road in 800 feet that goes the same way as the Forbidden Road,” she told us, conspiratorially. “Follow it for 5 miles, and it will take you where you want to go,” she promised. That sounded great, except the catch was that the Witch’s road was made of sand. Mom pulled the Covered Wagon onto the sand road and stopped for the night. We would need to wait for the sun to come up to see the desert around us as we searched for the dooms beyond where the road ended.
MapQuest riddle to solve after that. The hardest part about directions to a place in the middle of the wilder-ness is that a giant pile of sand doesn’t have an address, and the “roads” might find it from any direction. Another problem is that the “roads” don’t have names and are made of sand so can move and reshape themselves back into regular desert without telling Google.
got sweaty, because she had been wearing the same clothes for four days anyway, and already smelled like the stray humans in The City who camp in the dog bathroom. She had taken her bra off a couple of days ago when it started getting itchy, and never bothered to put it back on. Humans aren’t supposed to let their bits flop around like a pair of curious ears, they’re supposed to keep their bodies hard and their bits tied down tight when they run. But in the desert Mom discovered that she could run without a sports bra just as easily as I could.
Oscar the Doom Hunter
34.5199973-115.5127662
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