|
8.54 miles, rating: 2
Everything was closed for the holiday last night. We finally found a Szechuan restaurant that was open. We enjoyed the meal at the time, but Jacky was sick all day today, and I had a few side effects, too.
We got up really early to keep circadian rhythms aligned. Ate buckwheat pancakes at Scotty’s family restaurant. Waited for the laundromat to open. Errands and rest today before facing the desert for the next ten days.
The term family restaurant is usually, but not always, a euphemistic way to say they don’t have a liquor license.
We took Jacky’s bike to a bike shop near the motel. They put cork tape on her handlebars while we duplicated the key to the bike lock and shopped. Laundry, drugstore, some tourist things. Then I moped around with a headache and upset stomach while Dave cleaned and lubed the bikes and rode to the Nevada tourism office and the post office.
The sky was totally clear and blue, with snow-covered mountains to the south. The day was hot and windy. We wandered around looking for something non-spicy to eat. Found a good friendly deli, and even got a Guinness – first stout in a week. We came back past several buildings of a railroad museum under construction.
67.09 miles. Maximum 36 mph, rating: 8
We got up early and left just after 5:30. We sailed along fairly fast due to a drop in elevation and an occasional tailwind. Stopped at Lahontan reservoir. Quite nice, a modern dock.
Amusing signs: “Congested area – do not discharge firearms,” in a couple of places where there were two or three buildings amidst miles of emptiness. We had bear claws and coffee and hot chocolate at a country store where the phone booths seemed the most popular offering.
We were having lunch in Fallon by noon. Long, easy hills – Jacky measured one valley as 8 miles wide, peak to peak. I estimated it as 400' vertically. I recalibrated my computer 2.5% lower, to match the mileages shown on the road signs.
A calorie stop every hour seems to work well. Bikie cap under helmet works very well for me when riding into sun. Jacky’s hardshell helmet doesn’t accommodate the cap as well – it interferes with sunglasses and rear-view mirror.
5:00 PM: Fallon has 6000 people, several motels, a big international invitational rodeo that has filled up most of them with Albertans and other furriners such as Arizonans, and a movie theater showing Batman and Indiana Jones. We got a first-floor motel room by continuing to chat after being told that second-floor was the only choice. It turned out there was a room undergoing maintenance, available later in the day. We didn’t need immediate possession anyway.
Pick-ups
In Ecotopia, pickups are popular. They’re always new and shiny, and frequently high off the ground. In the Empty Quarter, pickups are even more popular, if anything, but they’re working trucks, sun-bleached and dirty.
We spent the afternoon at the museum seeing lovely old china and quilts, several kinds of ‘bobwire,’ a hog greaser (to alleviate dry skin), and a miner’s bathtub that used only a couple gallons of water. We spent the rest of the afternoon sleeping, swimming and reading. We had our first Mexican food of the trip and brought home a ton of groceries from Safeway.
In the small towns of the Empty Quarter–
- the cop on patrol waves
- everyone smokes
- restaurants don’t post menus
- Mexican restaurants may not be run by Mexicans
- Coors is considered a class brew!
111.30 miles. Maximum 28 mph, rating: 7
Riding strategy
Our thought was to get up before dawn and be on the road by sunrise. We’d take advantage of the cool part of the day to get in as many miles as we could. Then we’d lay over during the hot part of the day, continuing on after it started to cool down.The dawn part worked well until we got to Canada, when it was cool enough that we were glad to have a little of the day’s heat. By the end of the summer, we had also lost an hour of morning daylight, and another hour of afternoon, compared to the first of July.
The idea of knocking off during the hot part of the day mostly didn’t work. The day gets hot about 11 AM, and really doesn’t start cooling down until 6 or 7 PM, much too late to start riding again.
We tried our new plan of riding in the morning, resting in the afternoon during the hot part of the day, and then riding some more late in the day. Today, we took our break in Lovelock.
We started across the dreaded 40-mile desert at 5:40 AM. There was a sign that said, possibly erroneously, possibly not, “(nothing) for 29 miles.” The desert supported vegetation, about one plant every fifty feet, maybe every hundred feet. Further on, there were stretches with no plants. Wildlife count: three lizards.
We could see I-80 from the middle of the 40-mile desert, easily 15 miles away. Hard to get a perspective on size and distance of mountains.
Light travels far in the desert.
At the I-80 junction rest stop, I chatted with a fellow who claimed to be the organizer of the Fresno Climb to Kaiser. (They dropped Uphill when they became respectable.)
Lovelock is small and dull. We ate tuna sandwiches at one of the three restaurants in downtown and took a nap on the lawn of the Pershing county courthouse. We were awakened by two sonic booms that struck almost as one. There are a lot of military training flights in the Empty Quarter. Strolled past the swimming pool, bought crackers at Safeway, walked out to the motel district for root beers and ice cream.
A couple going west in a camper van stopped at the courthouse to chat. They had done all of Canada (ten provinces) last year, and jogged along the ‘Ri-doo’ canal in Ottawa. In Toronto, they had to park their RV away out of town.
Originally we had planned to ride to Rye Patch reservoir, which we reached at 82 miles. But the campground had no showers and no trees. So we rode another 17 miles to Imlay, and found a likely spot to pitch the tent under a tree.
Then we discovered the only restaurant in town was a bar that had burned down, so we rode on five miles to Mill City, had a root beer, and were told about another campground in eight to ten more miles. I sat next to a truck driver, and thanked him for the courtesy and consideration shown by truck drivers in general. Fresh in my memory was the driver who slowed his rig to a crawl to follow us through a one-lane stretch of I-80 under repair. All the way through, we kept a wary eye on him in our mirrors; we gave him a big wave as we came back out onto wider road.
As the day cooled off, the world was taken over by grasshoppers. It was impossible to avoid running over hundreds of them, and there were a lot of hitchhikers. There were also quite a few big crickets. No birds around – seems strange, with all that yummy food there for the taking.
The campground was an I-80 rest stop about 20 miles southwest of Winnemucca. There were no showers, but the restrooms had running water, so we took sponge baths and changed clothes.
I woke up in the wee hours and had a look at the stars, but Jacky was dead to the world (her first day ever, riding over 100 miles, and good for her!).
Sprinklers came on about 4 AM, but I had arranged the rain fly so I could easily pull it over the tent, and it worked fine.
Extremely hot. Invasion of grasshoppers. Crickets the size of your fist. Sprinklers rained on the tent.
Great day.
75.72 miles, rating: 4
We chatted with a motorcyclist from British Columbia at the campground. It was a fairly quick ride to Winnemucca, which advertises itself on billboards: “Always open!” – “5 billion people have never been there!”
8 AM: Second breakfast (first hot one) in Winnemucca. Jacky was a little sore from yesterday, but we did 13.25 miles in the first hour. The pace is picking up, though we are still slow uphill. We also slow down when we talk, so I tend not to.
We ate Belgian waffles at Jerry’s restaurant. We spent a little too much time, and it was hot by the time we reached Golconda pass (5154'). I was really hurting, and the wind was across, not a-tail.
We ate carrot cake and apricot squares at the foot of the grade, and stopped at a truckers’ rest stop at the top, where one driver was walking around prodding some of his cattle.
11:30 AM: Jacky tired and sore from yesterday. Golconda summit slow, hard work.
At one point, Jacky commented that she was glad she had come along on a bike instead of sagging me in a car. “I never would have believed it was so difficult!” she said.
Then we came down fairly quickly, and ended up in another very bleak desert, going southeast with a very strong wind. Sometimes it slowed us to 8 mph; sometimes it pushed us to 16 or 17.
We napped and ate crackers and vienna sausages at another I-80 rest stop.
5:30 PM: Golconda summit began a stretch of real desert of the 40-mile variety, one plant every 50'. We were low on water by the time we reached Valmy. There was a strong wind, mostly cross, only a little tailing. We were slow and tired; it was a hot day; the road was bad.
Battle Mountain is bleak and hot and windy, but we stayed at the friendly Owl motel and ate pepper steak and wild rice at the Owl café. We did laundry again. A hard day.
Battle Mountain was not very appealing at first glance. Then we discovered the carnival was in town! That improved things considerably (this says something about the town, also something about how desperate we were for entertainment). Ferris wheel, octopus, rock-o-plane, fun house, and games of skill. Lots of children, teenagers and young adults there. When the wind and the sun disappear, the weather is wonderful here. The carnival, a shower, the cool of the evening and food cheered us up a lot.
71.40 miles. Maximum 42 mph, rating: 9
We had breakfast at the Owl café. The decaf coffee tasted like tea.
Out of Battle Mountain, we rode 14 miles in the first hour, 20 miles in an hour and a half. We stopped at a closed rest stop at the Beowawe geysers, but didn’t see them geyse. (According to this source, the Beowawe geyser field was destroyed in the ’50s by a geothermal project.)
We hit several miles of old concrete road, with the oncoming side closed for reconstruction and both directions of traffic on our side. The lanes had been narrowed. We tolerated bumps when we had to, and rode in the traffic lanes when we could.
In Nevada and Wyoming, there are transverse grooves on the interstate shoulders to wake up drivers if they drift out of the driving lanes. On the new asphalt roads, the grooves look as if they were made by a wide single-treaded tractor, and the shoulder leaves plenty of room for us. Even when we have to ride on them, they’re not bad.Concrete roads have sets of a dozen or so triangular grooves about an inch deep every hundred feet or so, cut with a saw. These are very uncomfortable to ride on. On new concrete roads, the shoulder is wide enough (the grooved section is narrow enough) to leave a couple of feet for us, not a problem. On old concrete, the grooves go clear across the shoulder, it’s very uncomfortable, and we have to ride in the traffic lanes, escaping onto the shoulder when necessary.
Finally I got the idea of riding on the other strip, the newly constructed part. It was Sunday, there was no activity, the road was complete except for the paint. Best idea of the day, even if it was only for another mile or two. (This idea served us well later on.)
If you spend hours every day simply sitting and riding, the mind may wander (not to say get lost). You may notice the occasional frivolous or fantastic remark emerging from the depths of these reveries.
I understand not being able to step into the same river twice. The real question is: can you step into the same river once?
I started riding two miles between rendezvous points.
Emigrant pass is over 6000' high. At that altitude, the country is better: the grass is green, there are sunflowers and trees. A vast improvement.
We're using good project management techniques: lots of measurable milestones, continuous knowledge of real achievement, flexibility in the short term without losing sight of long term objectives. Especially going up the Sierra, I took photographs of each milestone (the 1000-foot markers).
Geese are measured by the gaggle, ducks by the brace(?). I guess the unit for measuring grasshopper density is the plague.
3:30 PM, Elko. The country looks pretty for the first time since we got to Nevada. Good tailwind all day. We got to Elko about 1:30. There were lots of motels – we chose the Centre. We walked all around the town after a nap. There’s a diesel locomotive in a little park. The access doors on the side aren’t locked; you can open them up and see the guts – diesel motors, generators, all the good things. Mike is a railroad nut – I should tell him about this.
We stopped at an Arctic Circle drive-in for drinks and onion rings. There was a nice museum, with extraordinary carved eggs. Back to the motel to change into long pants and go to the most foreign sounding of the three Basque restaurants in town. We got tons of food – beef tongue, meat stew of some kind, lamb steaks, beans, french fries, spaghetti, soup, salad, sherbet... We ate less than half. $23 for the two of us, including beer. Good, but too much protein!
We went back to the motel for a short nap and ended up sleeping all night.
105.05 miles. Maximum 46 mph, rating: 8
Today we had a cool and easy run to Wells. With Snowville as tomorrow's objective, I suggested going on to Oasis and possibly Montello.
I once saw a description of the view of a cyclist from behind: two seals fighting over a wishbone. I usually rode in back to let Jacky set the pace, and despite our distance from the sea, there was lots of good seal watching!
First flat – my back tire – west of Wells. I found a tiny piece of steel wire inside, but couldn’t see a wound on the outside of the tire.
At Wells, we stopped at the one-room city building: tourist info, police department, etc, all together. We chatted with a friendly cop, who told us the first pass wouldn’t be too bad, but Pequop would be narrow with no place to get off the road.
In this case and subsequent cases, we learned to discount advice from non-cyclists. Most people, though they mean well, have no appreciation for grades, clearances, road surface quality, or even distances.
At the drugstore where I bought a new watch, the ladies were more concerned about the bright white alkali desert. We bought groceries, then tried to nap in the park. It was too hot in the sun, chilly in the shade.
We went back downtown. Had sandwiches and homemade turkey soup that had gotten cold. The waitress got everything wrong, including the bill. When I asked her to add it up again, she got it wrong again. Needless to say, she didn’t get a tip. I see so many vivid examples apropos Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – people who just don’t give a damn!
Elko and Wells are at 5000'; Pequop summit is at 7000'. This didn't seem too bad. But there’s a climb out of Wells, followed by a long descent into Independence valley, and all that lost altitude has to be recovered.
Finally, some trees on the mountains. The country looks like the east slope of the Sierra – bare rocks, sparse grass, scrubby evergreens.
Noisy grasshoppers snapping at a rest stop partway up. On to Oasis – the pass was fine. Oasis had a motel and a good country store with booths to sit and eat. We had banana nut bread (great, if unexpected!) and filled our water bottles.
The road from Oasis to Montello is much better than I-80. We rode abreast in very light traffic from 5:30 to 7:00. There was a motel at Montello, but we decided to stop first in the bar. We had a brandy – great, even if it was Christian Brothers from a shot glass.
When we tried the motel about 7:10, there was no response. The people at the bar told us later that the motelier ignored the buzzer after 7:00 PM – moomph! From then on, we took care of the lodging first. We pitched the tent on a little patch of grass at the one-room post office next door to the motel.
The worst thing about camping in random places along the way was worrying about whether we were going to be rousted out. We never were.
There was a starling (?) nest just above the tent, between a loose screen and the post office building. These look like giant wasp nests, made of papier maché or whatever. Once you realize they’re for birds, rather than insects, the nests don’t seem outsize at all.
Trains went through every few minutes all night, several locomotives on each, full out. The ground shook. A coyote barked/howled once. Every dog in Montello started barking. Good night.
