A Long Drive

Sign proclaiming the loneliest road

Just a few days of warm weather causes us to miss the cold – just a little. About the drive on the Loneliest Road. (Map this!)

After waiting six weeks for the car to be done we were hoping for a nice relaxing drive home. Hah! We just happened to pick the worst storm of the season to drive to San Francisco. After dumping nine feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada it moved straight towards us. Luckily we skirted around it but outside Idaho Falls we hit the slipperiest spot on the trip. Going 50mph was fine until I wanted to pull over to take a photo – the FJ scooted forward like a hockey puck upon the most minimal braking.

First Greenery in weeks – Sand Mountain

The storm provided us with an excuse to take “The Loneliest Road in America”, a somewhat gimmicky moniker for Route 50 going through Nevada. In the 1980’s a guide book disparaged this section of highway and gave it this title in a pejorative sense, but the locals have turned it into a marketing tool to entice travelers to drive through. There is a small industry that sells pins, stickers, and other trinkets saying things like “I survived the loneliest road”, and such.

In a state where glitzy casinos are the main draw the Loneliest Road is a pleasant tongue-in-cheek diversion. The towns are spaced about an hour apart, hardly what one would call a remote area. There are also eleven(!) mountain passes, some that rise to almost 8,000 feet and others that are a mere 4,000 foot bump. The road conditions were excellent through out and did not have much traffic, certainly better than contending with the trucks on the interstate.

All this already seems remote, as I write this in Baja California. Sitting on the beach with multi-colored drinks provides ample opportunity to reflect on our travels through cold weather with nostalgia.