Today was a pretty busy day. We got up pretty early because we knew we would have a fairly long drive ahead of us. We wanted to get to Reno for the night because that would leave us with a little more than 5 hours of driving the next day before the wedding. We were out of the hotel room by 8 AM but we had a few stops to make first. We first stopped at the Hard Rock Casino in Las Vegas to see if we could get another magnet/bottle opener. Oddly, the pin shop only sold guitar shaped openers from their restaurant. The magnet did not say Las Vegas on it nor did it say Hard Rock café, so we skipped it. Next we went to a post office to mail some postcards. The post office was supposed to open at 8:30, we got there at 8:31 and we waited inside with some frustrated customers until the doors finally opened at 8:40. Then we hit up a Walmart. We needed to buy some water and snacks for our trip. We also needed a cooler to put all of our water in. This particular Walmart was different than most in that they only sold three different styles of coolers. Two were unbelievably huge and cost $30 something each while the third style was Styrofoam. We are not a fan of Styrofoam coolers because they break VERY easily but we were not about to pay over $30 for something we would just end up giving to the guy at the rental car place in another week. The Styrofoam cooler was a little bigger and sturdier than they usually look so we bought it for $6. We were really after a $6 coleman cooler, which most Walmarts carry, but no luck today. We bought some snacks, a case of water and a bag of ice, all for about $20. The cooler ended up being pretty good sized. We fit maybe 15 bottles of water in there with the bag of ice, but as we found out later in the day, when the ice melts it seeps right through the Styrofoam and you end up with a wet car seat. We then hit a bakery across the street from Walmart, Great Buns, because we heard they made great black and white cookies (and Matt hasn’t sent us any yet…inside joke). We bought a couple of cookies, a couple of bagels and a couple of cupcakes. We should have bought milk too because the cupcakes were very rich.
Finally, after all of our shopping, we were on our way by about 10. We headed around Las Vegas and up US 95 towards Reno. The road started out like any other interstate, 4 or 5 lanes in each direction but it eventually made its way down to one lane in each direction. The speed limit was always 70 until you got into small towns where it dropped to 55, then 45, then 35, then 25 all in about a half mile. We made pretty good time, Chris was not afraid to pass people and he also had no problem pushing the limits of the rental car, cruising along in the 90-100 mph range for miles on end. Later in the day this would get us in trouble, but for now everything was great. We lost nearly all radio stations pretty quickly after leaving Las Vegas . The only station we were able to pick up was a Spanish speaking country station. This was frustrating until we dope slapped ourselves and remembered we had satellite radio. There were no more issues with radio stations after that.
The majority of the drive at least early on paralleled the Nevada Test Site to the east and someplace over the mountains, Area 51. Years ago they tested nuclear weapons at the Nevada Test Site, only on days when the wind was blowing just right since it is only 60 or so miles from Las Vegas. Supposedly, people would come from Vegas to witness these tests (from a distance of course).
The majority of the drive at least early on paralleled the Nevada Test Site to the east and someplace over the mountains, Area 51. Years ago they tested nuclear weapons at the Nevada Test Site, only on days when the wind was blowing just right since it is only 60 or so miles from Las Vegas. Supposedly, people would come from Vegas to witness these tests (from a distance of course).
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| Mountains to the east and test site behind the mountains |
At some point Chris turned the driving over to Jackie. We turned off of 95 at some point north of a town called Goldfield. Chris had seen a road on the map that looked interesting and it took us to the same place that the main highway would have taken us so we went that way. The road, called Silver Peak Rd, had a posted speed limit of between 25 and 45 and they meant it. There were no chances of seeing police or getting a ticket, the speed limit was just slower because of poor road conditions. So we drove along the bumpy road for 20 or so miles to the small “town” of Silver Peak, NV. This wasn’t much of a town, it seemed more of a collection of rusted out pieces of stuff left over from who knows what. There were some people living there but mostly in RVs. Every RV had a pickup truck with it, we suspect that this town was home to some seasonal miners or something like that. Along the way to town we did see a family of deer on the side of the road. After looking them up when we got to our hotel we think we saw mule deer. We took some pictures in case anyone knows what kind of deer they are. After leaving the bustling town of Sliver Peak we turned north to make our way back to US 95. Along the way we stopped for a geocache which was located at a cinder cone, which is a small volcano. This was kind of neat because there were lava rocks, kind of like you’d find in gas grills, all over the ground surrounding the cinder cone.
Chris took over the driving again at this point, which turned out to be a bad thing. Once we were back on US 95 we were cruising along at a pretty good pace. We would like to blame what happened next on the lack of wazers (users of the smartphone app “waze”, who point out hidden speed traps among other things to other users), but we knew we were the only wazers out there today so we were not depending on them one bit. The cop was kind of hidden behind some bushes on the side of the road. This is probably the first time we have seen a cop EVER on one of these straight, easy to speed, desert highways. Out in these parts there are no local police departments, just state police whose responsibility is policing the long, empty stretches of highway as well as the small towns in between. You can usually count on being able to drive very fast on these roads without risking a ticket because the area is so sparsely populated that the police have a HUGE area to cover. It probably is not uncommon for a single police officer to have to patrol a 100 mile or more stretch of road and the side roads that go along with it. As soon as we saw the police car we knew it was too late. He turned on his lights before we even got to him. We passed him as he was pulling out and Chris pulled over long before he caught up to us. This guy was pretty nice for a cop. After the usual pleasantries (license and registration, where you going, do you know why you got pulled over) we stuck up a nice conversation with the guy. We hoped this would make him not write us a ticket but it didn’t. He asked us how fast we thought we were going, Chris replied 83 (chris knew we were going faster). He told us he clocked us at 88. To quote Dr. Emmett Brown, “If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 88 miles per hour... you're gonna see some serious shit”. Well we did see some serious shit, in the form of a speeding ticket for going 80 in a 70. Yes, he was a nice guy after all. He only wrote us up for 80 instead of 88. He claimed that saved us about $100. We got off with only a $172 ticket. Does anyone know if Nevada shares information with Massachusetts when it comes to insurance premium uppers for tickets? We are actually considering coming back to Esmeralda County, Nevada on September 24th for our court hearing. Maybe the nice officer won’t show. Oh yeah, we told the cop about our blog and we asked him if we could take his picture. He politely declined saying that he is not allowed to have his picture taken but we could take a picture of his car of something. Well we got you buddy, you just didn’t see us do it!! After thinking about this incident a little more we think we know why we actually saw a police officer today. Nevada pretty much has only 3 east-west roads across the entire state, I-80 up north, US50 in the middle and US6 a little down from US50. That means that all of the east-west traffic across Nevada is on one of these three roads. We were on US95 heading north but for a short stretch 95 and 6 run together east-west. It makes a little more sense that the cop was here since a good amount of traffic uses this road. We will know for next time.
After we got going again we ran into a pretty heavy rainstorm. It isn’t supposed to rain in the desert so this was unusual. It rained pretty hard and there was a good deal of lightning off in the distance. You always hear about flash flooding and there are always flash flood alerts but you rarely see it actually happen in the desert. The rain had stopped and we were driving along and all of the culverts filling up and little stream beds were raging with fast moving, muddy water. All of the rain actually caused some flash flooding and looking at the water moving it was easy to see how people can get seriously hurt in desert flooding. It doesn’t rain much but when it does it seems to flood quickly. After driving through the rain for a little while we came across the town of Mina. This is significant because our niece’s name is Mina. We took a picture which we hope her dad will share with her.
We turned off of US95 again and headed north on a far less travelled state highway, route 361. We liked this because experience told us that the police all hang out on the more frequently travelled highways so we could drive fast again without fear of being harassed. Along the way we almost ran over what we think was a coyote. He was very small and scrawny; we estimate he was less than 20 pounds. We wondered if it was a baby but it seemed to be all alone. We tried to get a picture but after turning the car around he was too far off in the brush to get a shot. After getting moving again we came across a place to eat. Chris had been reading geocachers’ online logs and one guy kept mentioning that he ate a really good burger in a place called the Middlegate Station. So when we approached Middlegate Station we decided we would stop to eat. This place is the typical middle of nowhere bar complete with bikers hanging out in the front and a room in the back where you go to get beat up. But they had great burgers! Actually it wasn’t as bad as you might think. We read about it on tripadvisor and they said that while sure, bikers hang out there, you also might find Top Gun pilots from the nearby Navy air base, as well as just about anyone else who drives by. We went in and the place was pretty tiny. About 80% of the seating was at the bar, with 10% more around the pool table and the other 10% in the 3 or 4 tables they had. The guy behind the counter had sunglasses and a cowboy hat and it appeared that he hadn’t showered in forever. There were some bikers (not a lot, maybe half dozen) out front, one with no shirt on, all of them with tattoos, and every single one of them with a beer and/or cigarette. Inside there were normal looking people, there were ranch hands, miners, and even two women. One of the women had a leather jacket and the other sported an eye patch. Just kidding there were normal looking women there too. While this was certainly not the type of place we normally go into, we did not at all feel unwelcome or out of place. Besides there being a bar where you could drink your day away there was a pool table in the back (no one was playing) and there were 100’s if not 1000’s of dollar bills taped to the ceiling with all kinds of messages on them from past customers. There was even, get ready for this, a geocache INSIDE of the bar. We had to beg the kid behind the counter for the location of the cache and he eventually told us where it was. For about $20 we each had a really great burger and fries and a tall Miller draft (you can’t go wrong with $1 beers even if it is Miller). The pictures we took here are kind of grainy because we were trying to get pictures without looking too out of place.
After that adventure we were back on the road. Our goal now was simply to make time. Since it was relatively early in the day (4ish?) and we were only about 2 hours from Reno we decided we would drive beyond Reno, maybe as far as Sacramento, CA so that Saturday we had a much shorter drive before the wedding. So we filled up on gas for the first time just outside of Reno (Nevada prices are FAR cheaper than California) and we started driving. We made a couple of more stops, first at Donner Memorial State Park where we went to the site of Donner Camp and one of the cabins that the ill fated group stayed in before many of them died and the rest of them ate each other. (Look it up). We then drove up to Donner Pass. We were glad we did not stop in Reno because we would have whizzed right by this on I-80 trying to get to the wedding. Since we had already made reservations in Roseville, CA, we had no need to hurry so we were able to stop at just about every overlook on the way up the pass. The views were quite impressive and we were glad we drove a little bit out of the way to see this. The only complaint was that it was now dusk and the light was fading fast. We were able to snap a few pictures from on top of the mountain before heading back to the highway and ultimately our hotel, where we arrive at about 10 PM.
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| The speed machine |
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