In the following post, I will illustrate and summarize a trip to the western United States taken in September 2022. I visited my friends Jan and Tom, as well as Jan’s son Jeff and his wife Liz, who all live in Reno, NV. Also, on the way to Reno, I stopped at Chaun and Billy’s, close friends of Jan’s, who live in Colfax, CA, and at the time had just purchased and moved into the house that Jan used to own. One of the highlights of the trip was a road trip of a couple of days together with Tom and Jan to Ely, which is in the very northeast of Nevada. This was my first visit to my friends after my last trip in 2018, before Covid.
My vacation started out with me flying from Zurich to San Francisco, I lucked out and was able to get a cheap non-stop flight. However, some of the time I saved in terms of layovers, I lost again after arriving in San Francisco: somehow, I had been randomly selected to answer a lot of questions at the immigration counter and the border agents insisted on verifying my travel plans by making a phone call to Jan. This was something new for me, but I was eventually able to proceed to the rental car pickup, where I joined another line of people that wasn’t moving very fast. After finally leaving the airport in my rental car, I drove the roughly 230 km to Colfax, where Chaun and Billy kindly hosted me at their home for a couple of days. I got there in the middle of the night, since after figuring out that even simple hotels were pretty expensive in the San Francisco area I decided to just cover the distance instead of spending a night somewhere near the airport.
After Chaun and Billy showed me what they had already worked on in their newly acquired home, Chaun took me to Billy’s work in Roseville. Billy is a heavy-duty mechanic, and at the place he worked, there was a lot to look at for anyone interested in machinery.
Following the stay at Chaun and Billy’s house, I drove from Colfax to Reno, which is about an hour and a half worth of driving. There I dropped off my rental car and was able to stay at Jan and Tom’s.
Next on the list was going to the Virginia City Hill Climb together with Jeff. This hill climb race takes place annually on a 5-mile section of closed-off road near the historic mining town of Virginia City, which is about half an hour away from Reno. Jeff did not take part in the event that year, though he had raced his Corvette many times there in the years before.
After spending a couple of days at Tom and Jan’s house, we headed out on the road trip to Ely that Jan had been planning. To get to Ely, we first drove to Fallon from where we continued east on U.S. Route 50, on the portion of it that was once named “The Loneliest Road in America”. Indeed, there are virtually no signs of civilization along the road for long sections. Only every 150 km or so there is a small town with a few dozen buildings. Leading from western Nevada to the eastern part of the state, the road crosses mountain ranges and desert valleys, through the so-called Great Basin. We took a lunch break at Middlegate Station, a gas station with a restaurant but not much else around it about 80 km east of Fallon in the desert. We got to Ely in the evening and moved into a room at the Rustic Inn motel. Ely is basically a small town in the middle of nowhere, however it has some neat things to see for sure. Like many other small towns in the Nevada desert (many of them are abandoned today), it has a rich history of mining, and nearby is an open-pit copper mine that is still active today. Also, there is a large railroad museum that we visited. It hosts a lot of old rolling stock and a full fabrication workshop that is still used by the volunteers running the museum today. There is a museum train as well, unfortunately we didn’t get to see in operation though.
Back in Reno a few days later, I did another day trip to go mountain biking in the Lake Tahoe area. I rented a bicycle at a bike shop in Incline Village and booked a shuttle that took me from the town to the top of Mount Rose Highway, the road connecting Reno to Incline. From there, I rode part of the Tahoe Rim Trail. The total ride was about 30 miles, with some quite demanding climbs, at least for me. Getting through all of it was made a lot more enjoyable since I met a fellow rider named Steve on the shuttle, and we completed the whole ride together. Steve lives in Washington state and was touring the area with his travel trailer and his dog, looking for places to go mountain biking.
Finally, I spent a few days around Jan and Tom’s house in Reno, before renting a car again and driving back to San Francisco, stopping once again at Chaun and Billy’s in Colfax.
