Yep, the gusting wind overnight has ruined the joy of
gaining an extra hour today as we move into Pacific time! Having been awake at 4am I was then woken up
by the violent rocking motion of the RV again around 7am (pacific time). So here I am blogging nice and early as we
won’t be moving anywhere until this wind dies down to a more reasonable speed.
Today did not go as planned!
We left Border around 11am despite the wind still being quite strong but
it was manageable (ie - I let Simon drive).
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| Highway 50 - America's loneliest road (they are not wrong) |
The morning was all about me as I had decided that we would make a small
detour so that we could visit Ruth, Nevada - for purely selfish reasons! It took about an hour and a half to get there
and wow, was it in an isolated area?!
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| Heading through these mountains - good idea or bad idea? |
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| Bad idea! But we got through it.... |
In Ruth, Nevada we stopped with our hazard lights
on by the sign and a friendly local pulled over to check that we hadn’t broken
down as, in her words, ‘there is nothing out
here, we only have one bar!’ She went on
to explain that the town of Ruth used to be in a different location but was moved
to ‘New Ruth’ in 1903 due to mining opportunities in the area. It took us less than a minute to see the
whole town. We took a couple more snaps
and popped in to use the post office. It
was freezing cold so we didn’t hang around for long.
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| To be rebellious I parked to the left of this sign, no one tells me what to do.... |
To get to Ruth we had gone through the town of Ely. We had laughed at their extortionate gas
prices (roughly $2.50 per gallon) as we had half a tank so we didn’t need them
today…. Or so we thought! We headed
south on Highway 6. This route, along
with Highway 50 (known as the loneliest road) really are the most remote and
desolate places we have driven so far, but with more features than Kansas of
course! Having left Ely far behind a
sign saying ‘no gas for 96 miles’ drew our attention. Our dashboard computer told us our fuel range
was 117 miles, so cutting it fine. But,
this gas wasn’t even in the direction we wanted to travel! I used the Satnav to work out that there are
NO gas stations at all on Highway 375, otherwise known as the Extra-terrestrial
Highway. Just to double check we paused
at the junction with the 375 where we had planned to turn left towards
Rachel. A sign saying ‘no gas for 111
miles’ confirmed our fears. We would be
foolish to drive down there and risk breaking down in the middle of nowhere with
our range now shown as only 52 miles.
Some steep gradients and driving into strong winds had really affected
our fuel economy! Sadly, this meant we
would have to make an unwanted detour to the town of Tonopah, still some 48
miles away. The town was roughly an hour
away, maybe longer when you are nursing your 5.7 litre V8 at 56 mph to the nearest petrol
station! It was an extremely tense drive
for us both, not least because it was far from the flat
terrain we really could have done with.
Tonopah was the other side of a series of steep mountain passes. I drove as gently as possible up hill and
then let the RV coast whenever we had a chance to go downhill. We even got into conversation as our range
reduced about how one of us would have to stay with the RV when we ran out of
gas whilst the other cycled into Tonopah and bought a canister of gas and would
we have enough daylight to do this?! It
was a massive relief when we coasted into the first, most expensive gas station
in Tonopah and put some $2.69 gas into our tank. Ely had the last laugh today!
Then we had to decide where to stay for the night now we found
ourselves in a town we never planned on visiting and we acknowledged that we
weren’t going to be doing any alien or area 51 searching today. Simon found that the Little A’le’Inn in
Rachel had spaces for RVs to park overnight so we started heading back to the
junction with the 375 along the same route we had just travelled. However, as it started getting dark we agreed
to stop in a rest area for the night as our plans on the Extra-terrestrial
highway would be best carried out in daylight.
There was not another soul about so we could leave the generator on as
late as we liked to give ourselves power.
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| Our overnight spot - surrounded by cloud and nothing or no-one else |
Our over-confidence and lack of experience had cost us 2 hours of
journey time and some expensive gas and delayed our plans by a day but at least
we had avoided becoming abandoned in the middle of nowhere - today we learnt that there are not gas stations on every corner in the USA.
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