← PreviousExploring San Francisco and Alcatraz: iconic sights and city lifeThe next stop took us to Ceres, a small place by the country's standards where you only stop for very specific reasons. Nobody comes to wander here, and as it happened, the only well-rated, affordable Airbnb between San Francisco and Death Valley was hidden in its little streets. We'd told our host Cynthia exactly when we'd arrive, and everything was ready when we parked in front of the red-brick terraced entrance. As soon as we'd switched off the engine, the white panelled door opened and she welcomed us.
We immediately felt at home in this big house that was a bit short on life. After a shower, we shared our meal with Cynthia and swapped life experiences, as she was fascinated by Australia. Like many Americans, she didn't have a passport and had never really left this immense, vast and dense country. Our adventures in Oceania made her very curious, but no more than we were when we learned that her son lived in Vermont on the East Coast and programmed video games. The conversation carried on until breakfast the next morning, and it was with regret that we got back on the road, but Death Valley was waiting for us.
The landscape there was lunar; the scorched rock gave the place a timeless atmosphere. If no one was in your field of vision as a marker of our era, you could have imagined yourself five hundred years back, watching a stagecoach go by chased by a band of Native Americans on horseback. It was only mid-February, but the sun was beating down enough on our heads for us to walk around in T-shirts, and we didn't dare imagine how harsh the summers must be. The geography was complex: you went from a perfectly flat basin to a series of wave-like hills, from dazzling white rock to dark yellow stone.
One of the main attractions takes you to an immense arid plain, whose length the eye struggles to take in, notable for being 85.5 metres below sea level. A sign planted in the cliff, apparently 85.5 metres up if the staff did their job properly, helped us grasp concretely what that figure meant. We felt small before such immensity, beneath our feet and above our heads, where the sun was setting slowly but with determination.
We crossed the border between California and Nevada after nightfall, and the sign marking the crossing was in darkness as we passed. The change of state soon became quite clear, judging by the profusion of casinos and billboards along the road extolling the virtues of gambling. We were a bit on edge because we'd booked a room for the night on the wrong day. We contacted people through Airbnb to see if they could put us up for the evening, but there was no guarantee anyone would reply.
We dreaded having to spend another night in the car, after our misadventure of the night in Monterey and with the cold settling over the Vegas valley in the middle of the desert. Luckily, Jimmy got in touch to say he'd be delighted to help us out and we could arrive whenever we liked. Relieved, we did some shopping in a big organic store and then, after a few minutes' drive, knocked on his door. He was tall and imposing, smiling like every American we'd met so far. He showed us our room, the Batman room, decorated in honour of Gotham City's superhero.
While we were eating, he came over a little shyly and surprised us with a most unusual request. "I don't know if it's cultural and if you all do it, but could you not walk around the house naked?" Seeing our wide eyes, he understood it wasn't particularly a French custom. He then explained that he'd had a French couple a few weeks earlier who came out of the shower in their birthday suits to go back to their room. We all had a good laugh, and he felt a bit silly, because he'd turned down every request from French people since then and had only accepted ours because of the emergency we were in. We promised not to walk around the house naked and went to bed ready for the next day's hike.