A couple of planning errors came to light yesterday, I am glad to say I can’t take all the credit for them!
Last nights motel was near the Salt Lake City airport in a high tech area with a few other motels. After we left the Interstate and drove to the motel there were no signs of ANY restaurants. In the hotel room was an order-inn menu, so we ordered from that, amazingly it was pretty good! When we left this morning we found a Perkins family restaurant about 150m away! Shame, their food is normally pretty good. The second error revealed itself when I was checking the distance to go. It showed a trip of 800km today and 270 tomorrow, which didn’t make sense for a couple of reasons; one why weren’t they a little more equal, and as tomorrow is the last day before we pick up the trailer, why did I have an overnight stay booked, we could have gone straight to the trailer!! The easiest solution was just to change tonight’s stop and eqaulise the trip, hence we are now in a town called Winnemucca, some where in the depths of Nevada.
We had a leisurely departure from Salt Lake and picked up Interstate 80 (again!), the temperature was around 10°C, with good visibility but the promise of showers.
We were soon driving along the edge of Salt Lake, and then out to the salt flats, famous for car speed runs. Today the salt flats looked more like saline puddles
Off in the distance we could see a huge pile of white “stuff”, first thought was a snow dump, second thought was correct – salt.
and a little closer
I recall last year being amazed at how many FedEx, UPS etc trucks there were on the Interstate, there seemed to be one every couple of minutes. This year they have upped there game with BIG trucks!
These trucks have the ability to go down hill very fast, albeit swaying all over the place. Uphill….. not so fast, we were continually overtaking / being overtaken by this guy for about 100 miles.
As we climber back up to the 6500ft mark we got a clearer view of the scenery compared to the last few days.
We also hit a few rain showers on the way, this one was about 250m off the road as we passed it, but we still got a reasonable fall out of hail from it.
With another time zone under our belt, we are now on Pacific time, we arrived at the hotel just before 4PM. Plenty of time for a walk and some geocaching. There was an interesting geocache that was actually a walk through historic Winnemucca, which guided you to various landmarks and you had to answer questions about them. The town seems to gain most of it’s “fame” from the number of banks robbed by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid!
Below is the court house, probably the most modern building here.