Moonscapes and Dust Storms, Wind and Smoke

Day 25 Las Vegas NV to Fallon NV

400 Miles

Oy...what a day!

We left the Oasis RV Resort around 8:30am. Jim just loves to drive in rush hour traffic in major cities! He likes a good challenge.
Me? I think I'm figuring out why I have heart disease...






Our route took us to I215 to I515 which we followed from the southeast side of the city to just a little northwest of the city, where we picked up US95 northwest toward Reno. Yes, we've heard about the earthquakes. Jim likes excitement! Maybe I should go on Prozac...



This brings me to one of differences from home. Out west here, the locals like to put THE in front of whatever freeway they are referring to. “No, you don't want THE 15 this time of day, you want to go THE 215 east to THE 515 and follow that back toward the city.” In Phoenix it was THE101 and THE 202...



We drove through what looks like a moonscape. Take away the scraggly brush and I'm sure this is where they filmed the fake moon landing....only kidding.

Out in the middle of nowhere we passed a silica mine. Isn't that the stuff that comes in a little packet tucked in the tissue paper at the bottom of the shoe box, marked *Do Not Eat* when you buy new shoes? Like who is the dufus who would think that there's something good to eat in the bottom of a shoe box?



Okay, first let me apologize to the people of Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. I thought areas of your states were the most boring, desolate, uninhabitable places in the country.



I WAS WRONG!



What we saw today beat anything we've seen on other trips. Miles of nothing...and when we hit the little towns on the map, they were practically ghost towns with half the buildings abandoned. And the ones occupied were as bad as many we've seen in third world countries. Where on earth do these folks get their groceries? They have to eat...Some of the vistas were not too bad, we were heading west for a time and looking at the backside of the California mountains near Yosemite. They were enormous and covered with snow. It was nice to see a color other than brown.



But the very worst part of the drive wasn't the desolation...it was the WIND. We were buffeted constantly by strong crosswinds. Some were so bad we wondered if we'd get blown right off the road. Jim's arms were cramping from fighting to stay on the road. It was a two lane highway and when tractor trailers went by in the opposite direction we were pulled over by the vacuum. And if that wasn't enough, we kept hitting dust storms! Yikes! Two new england natives...we're not used to this. At first we thought the dust devils were pretty neat, like baby tornadoes, but then they all seemed to join together into huge areas of high winds and poor visibility and they weren't so 'neat' anymore!.



We would have made it to the Reno area but headwinds and crosswinds slowed us down a lot. We decided to stop here in Fallon, NV - about an hour east of the Reno area.

So we find this town, and it's very nice...but there's SMOKE, a LOT of smoke...let me guess. Yeah, there's a fire about 50 miles west of here, actually near where we were headed for the night, so it's a good thing we stopped when we did. This campground is full...the guy said people are afraid to stay in Reno with all the publicity about the earthquakes.



We didn't even put the slider out or unhook. Jim's not feeling well tonight, I think it's from all the stress of the drive today. He better feel good tomorrow, cause I can't drive this thing!