On the road again

Here I am at the same Comfort Inn in Elko, NV, where I stayed on the first night of my return trip in March. No Basque banquet tonight - I opted for fried fish at a fast-food place called Arctic Circle a half-mile from here. My full review: ick.

Again = repeating

At first I was disappointed that all routes to tomorrow night's stop included the same 570-mile stretch I drove just 4 1/2 months ago. How wrong I was! If you read my blog of the February-March trip you'll recall that the first week of my return included some tough, even terrifying driving through snowy, fogged-in mountain passes. Today's drive was as different as it could be!

All those passes hemmed in with snow, slick or bumpy with ice underfoot with signs announcing "chains or snow tires required," and hidden by fog and falling rain or snow were transformed today by sun, blue skies, clear air, and dry pavement. The few photos I took today mainly reflect the exuberance of actually being able to see the beautiful country I was driving through, like this shot of lovely Donner Lake in the Tahoe National Forest. I never saw this on the March trip, and if I had the piles of plowed snow wouldn't have allowed me to stop for a photo.

I couldn't resist the temptation to give you a before and after comparison. On March 9, after finally escaping from snowy Donner Pass (named for the Donner Party disaster in 1846-7) into Nevada, my first photo looked back at the Sierra Nevada. Here's the same shot today - all green, though I did see snowfields near the top of one of the mountains in my mirrors as I descended the pass. (As always, click for a larger version of the photo, still about 1/6 the original size.)

I'll end today's travelogue with two road scenes. The first is of a triple tandem truck - I hear and accept your comment about the folly of taking photographs while driving 80 miles an hour. I don't recall seeing these rigs before, including the March trip, but I saw many today. The first one I passed had just pulled into the right lane after passing another truck; the driver had to work for quite a while to stop his "train" of trailers from weaving back and forth like kids playing "crack the whip." I waited until the fun was over before passing!

This reminds me of my observation over the first few days of my March return trip that I-80 east of Sacramento belonged almost entirely to semis. Today there was lots of car traffic through California. Throughout most of Nevada, though, the Interstate has been lightly traveled and trucks are a large part of what traffic there is.

My last photo is about the beauty of engineering. A steep ridge just west of here is pierced by four short tunnels, all with the same Romanesque-arch shape though I suppose the two on the left are decades newer than the others. They carry the two I-80 roadways, and a few seconds after I took this photo I was entering the second arch from the left. The other two carry one rail line each.

Again = resuming

I paused in my wandering for 30 days in San Jose to visit my son Alex and provide unskilled labor for the renovation of the house he and Sigrid bought in the Willow Glen neighborhood. If you aren't waiting with bated breath to hear how far we got on the renovations, you should be. Just kidding, but I'm dying to tell you so skip this section if it will bore you.

Here's are some of the things we have accomplished since my July 11 post:

• Drywalled the kitchen and the area of the mud room where we had reframed a doorway to make a laundry enclosure. All the drywall has been mudded (or cemented in spots that touch the cement-board backing for the kitchen sink) and textured and is ready to paint. Yaaayyyy!
• Assembled several more kitchen cabinets. One is already permanently installed in the oddest corner of the kitchen floor plan to help us in placing the rest.
• Finished painting the half-bath off the mud room.
• Installed the toilet in the half-bath. This came just in time as all the drains in the full bathroom have stopped flowing and we were unable to reach the blockage. Looks like a call to Pilo the Plumber this week.
• Started watering the so-called lawns, really dust bowls, nearest the house in hopes that grass and maybe even weeds will spread to provide some ground cover.

I meant to take newer photos but I see I never did. Oh, well.

My travel plans have changed, of course

Tomorrow, instead of Yellowstone, I will go to Dubois, WY, to meet Jamie and the other Bike4Books (non-Facebook link) cross-country riders. In addition to donating to their Books to Prisons cause I've offered to put them up at the Dubois motel so they can enjoy a shower and other amenities. I encourage you to support their worthy cause.

Then I head for the South Dakota prairie somewhere out behind Belle Fourche, SD, to visit Deron and Mary Kazmaier. I've used Deron's PageStream desktop publishing software since the late 1980s when he had a company with an office in St. Louis and I thought I'd be using Amiga computers forever. Now I'm a user and beta tester of the Windows version, many releases later, and Deron continues to upgrade PageStream and provide excellent user support single-handed without benefit of electric and telephone lines. Over the last few days I've learned much more, including two additional websites he and Mary run, but I'm far from understanding some of it and will wait until after my Thursday visit with them to fill you in

After that I'm back on track in Scottsbluff, NE, and Iowa City. Some changes are likely farther east but I'll wait until I know what's happening before I post them here.