May 14 Vegas to Porterville

We left Las Vegas about 8:30 after a noisy night. The guy next to us started up his diesel pickup at 4 am, preparing to headout. He left it idling loudly for about 20 min.
As we were hooking up we met a nice family from the Netherlands. He wanted to give away his beer because they were leaving for home. The wife has a sister in Abbotsford.

The first picture is one we took yesterday of the New York New York Casino.

The drive to Porterville is a long one, 330 miles, mostly desert.

We had planned on stopping at Barstow for lunch and fuel but decided to do it at the turnoff for Bakersfield, there are usually services at most major junctions but not this one.
We kept driving, thinking something would show up but we got back into the desert and nothing in site on the horizon. The gas gauge was below 1/4 so I was getting kind of anxious.Bakersfield was almost 150 miles away. Eventually we came to another junction in the middle of nowhere and managed to fill up and breath a sigh of relief. I didn't question the price!

The GPS was telling us we would get into Porterville around 6pm but the mileage didn't make sense ,then we discovered we hadn't set the time on the GPS back from Utah time so we were happy to be an hour early.

There aren't alot of RV parks in Porterville, we picked the first one in the phone book, Eagles Nest. We pulled into this dusty place, were greeted by barefoot woman with no bottom teeth ,who told us where to park. The place is full of old rundown trailers with people living in them. Our site was covered in unmown dead grass.As soon as we stepped out of the truck we were swarmed by little flies. When I plugged in the power it didn't work. The locals were hanging out of their trailers watching.
As tired as we were of travelling, we decided we couldn't stay here and politely told the woman we were going to drive on a little further today.
Was that the duelling banjos from Deliverence we heard coming from somewhere as we drove off?
The next park was much better. Cleaner and no bugs. There's no tv or wi-fi but thats okay.

Mickey met a friend, Benji, who lives on a farm nearby but hangs out at the RV park. They had a good time chasing around. Mickey looks like a city slicker with his bandana!

There are quite a few old oil wells along the way ,still pumping a bit of oil out of the ground

We talked to Jason and will see him tomorrow after he makes a run to Fresno for his business.