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| From 2007 USA Elises |
We dropped her off at 11am, so had to eagerly get driving as we had a long drive today of about 8 hours. The next few days will all be of similar length as we have had to revise the itinerary once again. This is my fault as the itinerary I had put up on the Automapic journey plan included two September 26ths, which implied we would be in San Francisco and Battle Mountain Nevada at the same time. This reminded me of the bit in the first Red Dwarf book when Rimmer fails (yet again) in preparing for the Astro-Navigation exam by including two Septembers in his revision timetable.
Mentioning the Red Dwarf story isn't so random as it seems. Some people were asking whether the drives are getting boring, and what I do during them to stay interested. Audiobooks are a great way to make long drives fly by, and before leaving on the trip I stocked up on plenty including Red Dwarf, Terry Pratchett's Discworld, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Agatha Christie and James Herbert. I also bought a few stand up performance CDs by Eddie Izzard and Rowan Atkinson. Podcasts are also great for long trips, especially as there is new material almost daily. My staples here are World Soccer Daily, various BBC Five Live ones, Adam Curry's Daily Source Code and some other news and sports ones. I also had some that discussed Lost, but I haven't seen it since we left so can't listen to those anymore. Music still fills much of the day though. Iron Maiden has randomly been the most played band. What started as an amusing nostalgic listen to an old Maiden album has completely rekindled my childhood love for the band.
Back to the itinerary, the reason for the long drives over the next few days is that Todd off EliseTalk has had a barbecue planned for us in Chicago on Sunday. Due to my error with the schedule, we have one day less than we thought to travel the 2,000+ miles to Chicago. We really don't want to miss it, and the final date of the whole journey is something that we can't really adjust due to commitments both Jared and I have once we return home. From here to the end is going to be all road and no stay.
Yosemite Park was the latest planned destination that had to be pruned from the journey, and instead we traveled north east up through California towards Nevada. Once past Sacramento it's an incredible drive on undulating roads with sweeping bends; not the hairpin twisties we had driven near LA by any stretch, but nice roads to be on. The road surface was awful however, and we later learned that this is probably due to heavy snow chain usage ripping up the road. We had obviously started the day at near sea level, but just a couple of hours later were at 8000ft or so in snow-banked mountain roads with crisp, cool air. Very cool.
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| From 2007 USA Elises |
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| From 2007 USA Elises |
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| From 2007 USA Elises |
I realised that this would be the only time in the whole trip that we'd visit the same state twice, of course not including Pennsylvania and North Carolina, myself and Jared's respective starting and ending states. This time through Nevada we'd be passing through the north of the state, rather than the small southern section we visited when in Vegas. The terrain is very impressive, although there is very little civilisation between Reno and Salt Lake City, Utah. The 75 mph speed limit in Nevada it most welcome.
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| From 2007 USA Elises |
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| From 2007 USA Elises |
We finally reached our planned destination for the day, Elko Nevada. It has to be the winning town so far for turning heads; we may as well have rolled into town dressed in pink ball gowns riding penny farthings with our heads on fire. Having said that though I have to stress how nice everyone is in greeting us and inquiring about the cars. I had envisaged encountering occasional hostility or snide comments towards two brightly coloured foreign sports cars turning up in the middle of nowhere but that has turned out to be an unfair expectation. People's open warmheartedness absolutely everywhere we have been has been a humbling pleasure.
