Day 24 – San Francisco, CA, to Winnemucca, NV
On Thursday, when we spent the day in San Francisco, Charlie had enough foresight to leave his sweater in Mark D’s car, giving us another opportunity to meet up with Mark to get the sweater back. So, this morning we said good-bye to Steve and Hélène, and then joined Mark and his wife, Lori, for brunch in Albany, near Berkeley. It was so nice of them to come all the way out just to return Charlie’s sweater, and we’re so glad we had the chance to meet Lori.
After brunch, we hit the Safeway across the street and then got on I-80 heading … east! After three weeks of following road signs marked “west,” it was hard to wrap my head around the idea of going the opposite direction. Wait, which way do we want to go, again?
The plan was to drive as far as we could today … to see if we can get to Arches National Park in Utah by tomorrow. I had expected to see desert outside of Sacramento, and was surprised to find the terrain quite wooded and mountainous: I had forgotten that we would cross the Sierra Nevada mountains. The drive was very pretty, but the going was a bit slower than we wanted, especially with traffic tied up due to road construction.
In Nevada, the landscape finally opened up into desert. Miles and miles of flat, scrubby nothingness with some rocky hills on the horizon. We’re not camping tonight because A.) we’d rather put in miles and get through Nevada as fast as we can, and B.) there’s nowhere to camp along I-80 in Nevada. Nothing. Nada. We drove as far as we could, finally pulling off before 9 p.m. at a Holiday Inn in Winnemucca. Of course, there’s a casino attached to the motel, and the kids wanted to know why they couldn’t go play in the “game room.”
These poor kids. What time zone are they in? They were still so wound up at 9:30 that we had to follow through on a threat to separate them by putting Clare to bed on the bathroom floor, where she actually fell asleep. At least we gave her a pillow.
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