Road trips set off many memories for me of family vacations when I and my sisters and mom and dad all piled into the family car and off we’d go driving to see the sights. We made trips to southern Ohio’s Hocking Hills, Pennsylvania’s Cook Forest, and up to Michigan to pick and eat cherries at an uncle’s farm. One year we ventured across the great land to see the west and ended up in Southern California where my dad’s brother and his family lived.
So, when Jamie and I decided to take a road trip one summer from Denver to California, I envisioned turning our Honda into a little nest on wheels. We packed up the car, kept some water and snacks handy, and had a multi-cassette Harry Potter book to listen to when radio stations or music CDs got boring.
We plotted out our route, heading west on I-70 through Colorado and Utah, stopping at Colorado National Monument and Bryce Canyon, and then striking out through Nevada on Highway 50.
It was a good trip even though we almost died in the barren Nevada desert.
The drive through the Colorado mountains was as beautiful as usual and all very familiar. Frisco, Vail, Glenwood Springs were all places we’d been to many times and by Grand Junction a certain monotony had set in. Utah didn’t help the monotony. So, we found a motel and stopped for the night in Richfield.
Next morning we drove further south to Bryce Canyon National Park. So many people want to see the canyons that access is controlled. We parked well outside the park and took a shuttle bus in, stopping at different sites from which we could hike or jump onto the next bus to the next spot. The canyons are filled with spectacular red orange rock formations called hoodoos. Hoodoos are tall stacks of rock left over from eons of erosion. You can walk on top of the canyon edge and see acres of these 2 and 3 story tall chimneys of stone or you can hike down into the canyon and walk among them. It’s like walking among the feet of giants.
We wished we’d planned more time to see other canyons, like Zion, nearby but we had miles to make by sundown and so headed into Nevada. Driving across Nevada must be like driving on the moon except warmer. We got to Ely (eelee), by Nevada standards, a big city. Of course, we did a little gambling and Jamie got hit on by some lady hookers—neither of which was a highlight of our trip.
We went to Ely so we could pick up U.S. Highway 50, known as the loneliest road in America. It is that. From Ely, the highway just heads west in a more or less straight line, up one rise, over a crest, down into a valley, then up the next rise, one after another for hundreds of miles. Few towns, not much to look at and very little traffic. It was beautiful. We stopped in the little settlement of Austin which turned out to be a kind of artist’s colony in the middle of nowhere. Good lunch, charming shops, gotta go.
I had read that remains of some Pony Express stations could still be seen in the desert just off Highway 50. I thought that would be neat to see so I tracked one down. A guidebook listed one at a certain mile marker, a few miles off in the scrub and sand. But we couldn’t find that road and rather than turn around and search it out, we decided to continue on to Virginia City.
Good decision. We arrived in Virginia City, where Mark Twain worked for a time and which once rivaled San Francisco as a wealthy and elegant outpost of civilization on the mid-19th century frontier. We strolled around the quaint old Western town and then got back into our car planning to finish our day in Carson City. The car had other plans. It was totally dead. I had noticed while I was driving earlier that at one point all the dials, like the speedometer, went flat briefly but the car seemed OK so we kept on. Had we gone off into the desert way out in nowhere and the car had died there, somebody would probably have found our bleached bones years later, this being still in the era before cell phones and communication everywhere.
We got the car towed into Carson City where a mechanic replaced some electric gizmo—an ignition switch or something—and off we went next day over Donner Pass into beautiful California. We weren’t hungry, so we kept driving.
Almost the moment we crossed into California, traffic picked up and grew and grew until we hit one long traffic jam from Sacramento to the Bay Area. Ah, California! Joni Mitchell was just then singing about coming home to California and we were doing just that.
February, 2014
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