Packing for the new millenium.

Just me and my budget van.

Erin's New Home.

SF to Utah Part II: Nevada

We left the next morning in a loaded a van, which she drove, and I followed in her car, also loaded. We took I-80 east and had a nice scenic drive through CA with a combination of traffic and pretty mountain scenery and then into Nevada which is amazing. There is nothing there. You drive and drive and there's nothing and then suddenly, there's a bunch of houses. What on earth do these people do? We did drive by a number of prisons. (Signs along the road say not to stop for hitchhikers. Pray you don't have any car problems.)

It was pretty territory in the way that bleak, open space inspires awe.

I turned on the radio and heard "Heaven is a Place on Earth" (Belinda Carlisle) and "Abracadabra" (Steve Miller Band). If radio is any indication, it's still the '80's in Nowhere, Nevada. I saw a sign: "Danger Scalding Water: No Trespassing." Plumes of steam rose from the dirt and at sunset the sky was a crazy peach color. At dusk we passed a structure and I wasn't sure if it was a collapsed house or some sort of industrial thing.

We spent the night in Elko, which I've seen ads for in Sunset. Apparently there's tons of stuff going on like Cowboy Poetry and fishing and hiking. Everybody wears a trucker hat and drives a truck. Lots of people in skinny cowboy jeans, cowboy boots - it's a cowboy kind of town, but not unpleasant. There was a some snow on low brown hills and a suburban looking development.

Erin asked me if I was getting lots of good pictures and I said "Yeah, if you call 100 pictures of the back of a Budget van good."

In the morning we passed a gigantic casino guarding the border to Utah and then hit the salt flats and the brine-y smell of Utah.

Logan is north of SLC in a wide valley surrounded by mountains like Garmisch-Partinkirchen except the mountains are shorter, smoother and farther apart. We found the place and unloaded Erin's stuff. 930 miles by the time we returned the van. It wasn't fun, but it wasn't that bad. When am I ever going to drive through Nevada again?

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