My husband and I went to the Las Vegas in 1997 or before I don’t remember exactly. We drove from San Jose to Las Vegas. For coming back to the San Jose we took the National parks route. My husband loves adventure and national parks, nature things.

I am different, i like amusement parks:)

The Death Valley national park. It has only one restaurant and it has the casino inside. I don’t know now, because we don’t go to the Las Vegas after that.
I didn’t like that route. I played in the machine and got $ 45!!
The whole area was empty even though nobody was there. We wanted to pay national park entrance fees.
We went inside the office only one or two people were there.
We crossed the whole park. We wanted to see some people and nobody was there, no gas station also.

Finally, we reached to the Bakersfield it looked so empty too. We drove towards the “Mono Lake”.
The other entrance of Yosemite near the “Tioga pass”.
Near “Mono Lake”, there was one restaurant. When we reached the only restaurant they were about to close but they made some portabella mushroom sandwich. Those sandwiches were so tasty.
Since then we like to eat portabella sandwiches.
After eating sandwiches we reached to The Tioga Pass.
In the month of July, we have seen snow there. It was amazing to see so beautiful after so many hours scary drive.

https://www.nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/tioga.htm

https://www.monolake.org/