 When you travel full-time in an RV things don't always go as planned. We've definitely seen some amazing things the last few weeks but we've also seen a helicopter rescue, got blocked by the weather, and had a trip to the ER. I'll tell you all about it in this video. Hey birdwatchers, it's Robin with Creativity RV and we're good. We're here in Lone Pine, California chilling out in our v-park which we needed to stay in after some of our recent drama. Now we stayed a long time in an LTVA during COVID so we were a little antsy to get going and start traveling again so we headed up north on 395. The first place we went was Fossil Falls where we met a friend. There is an amazing boondocking spot there. The area is created by this volcanic activity and some glaciers and there used to be a big lake there. That's where you camp at an old dried-out lake bed and then about a quarter mile hike down are these fossilized waterfalls that are made out of this incredible black rock that have these giant holes bored down in them because when the water was there these boulders would swirl around in them. It's like nothing I've ever seen. It can also be a little bit dangerous. We saw people repelling there and people being a little bit crazy on the edge. When we got back to camp we actually realized that we were boondocking right next to a little airfield where these little private planes would land all the time and the winds were really high and they would kind of come careening in and we'd be like hey cool as long as you don't hit us. We felt like we were far enough away that we were safe but the winds were so high that it kind of kept us inside a lot and then one day we heard a plane we weren't used to and we looked out the window and it turns out that it was a rescue helicopter. So Doug and our friend and I jumped in a truck and we went down to the falls because we thought it was flight for life and that somebody had fallen in. We were completely confused because the helicopter would go over to the falls and then it would leave and he kept trying to like land on one leg in these crazy positions and that's when we realized it was actually a Navy rescue helicopter. Well finally it went back over to the falls so we went over to the trailhead hiked down to the falls to see what was going on and it turns out that it was actually a practice mission. We were really happy to see that the Navy rescue helicopters will come down into this BLM area and help if somebody is injured and we were absolutely amazed that this thing could even fly in these winds. I mean I think we were probably in 50 or 60 mile an hour gusts but I bet that's why they train in that kind of weather so that if somebody's injured they still know how to get down there and bring somebody back up. So luckily nobody got hurt and the next day our friend took us on a tour around the Death Valley area. Very cool. We went to a place called Rainbow Canyon which other people call Star Wars Canyon because if you seem like Top Gun it's the area where these jets will fly underneath you. You can actually hike out to the edge of this canyon and I'll tell you I was not getting too close to the edge because the drop-down was crazy. Sometimes the jets will fly really quick through the canyon underneath you and people camp out there forever to try and see one of the jets. And then our friend told us about this quirky little town called Darwin. So we thought it would be cool to go check it out. We go down there. We see the sign that says no services. We see all the old mining buildings that are collapsing and then we roll into this little town that looked like it had about 30 houses and a lot of trailers but nobody was on the streets. We got this really weird feeling like we were being watched. We were certain people were inside the house is just looking at us out the blinds. So we were going by and you could tell people were there because it was really clean like the porches that were swept off but nobody said anything to us and the only place that looked like it was open was the post office. Now we kind of wanted to get out and look around a little bit more but we didn't get the vibe it was that kind of place. So after we rolled around the town for a little while we took off. When we got back to our campsite we actually found a documentary on that town. The documentarian interviewed the people that live in the town and there's only like 35 36 people there and it is a weird mix of interesting people. There's a lot of mining history around this area that I didn't even know existed but after all of that collapsed everybody just left so there's no government there. There are no police there. There are just these like 30 40 people that live there and they don't want to leave really interesting place. I'll tell you if we've seen the documentary first we may have skipped the in-person trip to Darwin. So we headed back to our boondogging spot. It started to get hot and things started to slither which is always the time to leave the desert and we should have left a couple of days earlier because one day we were hanging out in the shade playing a game and all of a sudden I got this terrible pain in my lower back and I couldn't figure out what it was and then there was another one and Doug said what what and I put my hand on my back and there was some kind of a ball back there and look we're around bushes with crazy thorns on them and you know I thought maybe one had stuck to the back of my chair and I leaned back on it or something but when I dropped the ball into my hand it turned out that it was something that looked like a horsefly except for it was bright green and I'm telling you it really hurt so we ran into the house and when we did Doug saw that there was another one on my leg. These things do not want to die it turns out they crawl up into a ball to protect themselves this is actually the thing that bit me so we took this and we pasted it into Google to do a Google search and right away it came back and it said yeah this is an emerald cockroach wasp so here's the thing about these crazy wasps they bite their victims two times usually a cockroach is what they go for but online I read that they will do this to a lot of different species so the first time they sting them and that actually paralyzes their prey and with the second bite they're actually laying their eggs inside of their victim now I had two bites side by side and I'm telling you I've been stung by things before this was a whammy but then it went away and it looked okay so we packed up camp and we headed down the road to Lone Pine if you guys have not been to Lone Pine go this is my first time here and it's near the area called Alabama Hills which is where they filmed a ton of westerns like Gunga Den and Trimmers which we watched a while we were here that was really fun and Django Unchained and All the Lone Rangers it's really iconic and amazing there's actually a film history museum here that we checked out that was really really fun we loved Alabama Hills if you get a chance to go there do it if I were going to do it again I would do it earlier in the year because it is super busy out there there's boondocking spots but we couldn't find one that we could go to so we headed back into town we decided to stay in RV Park the one that we're in now because we wanted to do some laundry and have a hookup for a couple of days while we saw the area and that's when the bite on my back got kind of scary they swole up and they developed these little blisters so when I did the research on the Emerald Cockroach Wasp I found out that when they lay their eggs inside of their victim those eggs hatch in three days and then the larvae eat whatever they're implanted in from the inside out believe me there were videos that popped up online that I did not need to see suddenly I was getting shooting pains at my back and down my leg and it felt like I had gotten a muscle shot Doug went to look at it and he was keeping a pretty close eye on it and it looked like it was blistering and so of course we got a little bit worried but there were bugs inside me so we decided to go to the doctor here's the thing when you travel especially in these small towns there wasn't a doctor here now I don't want to go to the ER for a bug bite but we didn't really have a lot of choices and it seemed to be getting worse and not better we're on our way to the ER in Lone Pine California to see if I'm about to have Wasp babies out of my back we hope not we hope not well we didn't know whether we should feel silly about this or not they were great in the ER but what they said was it looks like my immune system should take care of it I wanted to know if it was even possible that there could be eggs in there so I submitted the picture to Iowa State University they have a site called bugguide.com and they said we think that's a cuckoo wasp which is similar well luckily they told me they thought that's what it was and that they would not lay eggs in people who it has taken a couple of weeks and the bites are almost gone well after that we decided to head right up on 395 and keep going north well the day that we decided to go there were some sudden high winds so we headed up to Bishop and by the way Bishop is rad too we actually liked it a lot you have to go to Shats Bakery if you go and it's a great little town with lots of boondocking and some hot springs but when we got there all of a sudden there were signs that said 395 was closed because of high winds so we couldn't keep going up the way we were going we didn't have a place to stay the winds were too high to go out in boondock so we decided to turn back around and go back to Lone Pine which was about an hour away and see if we could get a spot back in the RV park well it was hairy going down the road now I have an f 350 with a duly so I've got six tires at a nice heavy rig but we were behind a couple of other rigs that we saw teetering and we were actually really worried thank god we got a spot in the park on the way but then we saw a sign that said we couldn't come into Lone Pine because we couldn't continue on 395 because of high winds and they actually had barricades and we could see on the left hand side of the road that the cops were making everybody with a high profile rig pull over including all the semis and all the RVers so we couldn't go north on 395 past bishop and when we went back south we couldn't go south into Lone Pine we found out that the wind speed was like 40 50 miles an hour but the gusts were up to 70 if you haven't seen the video I did on the bomb cyclone in Colorado that I went through a couple of years ago the wind there was about 90 miles an hour and it literally picked my rig up in the state park and moved it about three feet so the wind is no joke luckily when we pulled up to the barricade we explained our situation to the patrol officer and he was nice enough to let us go through and get to the RV park so here we are we're all better now the wind is dying down and we're headed out of here tomorrow in super sight to keep going north up 395 we actually love it here if you get a chance to check out the eastern sierra nevadas do it we'll be back again but i'll tell you we're gonna bug out before the bugs come out i'll see you guys next sunday for a new video until then i hope you're all doing well out there have happy travels and be free