Google satellite image of farms along highway 99 in California.

Since we had seen a show late the night before and we were both sick and tired, we decided to sleep in for a little while. We ended up not leaving until almost 9:30. We had originally planned to drive through Death Valley on our way to Lake Tahoe, but since Lake Tahoe was forecast to get a lot of snow, we canceled that reservation and booked a hotel in Visalia, CA. We were still planning to drive through Death Valley even though it was going to be pretty far out of the way. But, since we got up so late, it made us want to reconsider, and since Visalia is near Sequoia national park, we decided we'd rather see it instead of Death Valley. So, we were able to leave via I-15 from Las Vegas until we reached a highway that would take us to Bakersfield. The land for this leg of our trip was pretty dry with a lot of mountains and strong winds from the south. However, before we hit Bakersfield, the landscape changed suddenly and dramatically from relatively-flat desert to green hills. We went north at Bakersfield on state highway 99 and drove through continuous farms on both sides, mostly orange farms. However, traffic also got a lot heavier, and this was made a lot worse because big trucks had a speed limit set to 15 miles per hour slower than everyone else, which meant that most cars wanted to stay in the left lane to pass the trucks, even if other cars wanted to pass them. We still got to Visalia with a few hours left in the day and even though I didn't have a map or directions of where our motel was, we found it without much difficulty and with enough time to drive to Sequoia National Park.