Rex and Nancy's Travels - "ALL WHO WANDER ARE NOT LOST" - JRR Tolkein

  We left Goose Lake State Park Friday morning and headed south into California.   Now that we are traveling in California we can tow the Jeep which makes Nancy very happy as she doesn’t have to drive.   We followed Highway 395 into Nevada and stopped just south of Carson City.   We are staying at Silver City RV which is a nice park with wide sites but very narrow streets.   After unhooking the Jeep a young man from the park escorted us to our site and starting guiding Rex while Nancy was parking the Jeep.   Unfortunately, he guided Rex too close to a tree and a branch tore our roof!    They had to cut off the branch before we could move the 5 th wheel to another site.   We don’t know why they put us in that site to begin with as the tree was so close that we would not have been able to run our slide out.    The kid called the park manager who had gone home for the day and we expected the manager to contact us.   Didn’t...

We left Ely on Tuesday morning and drove 69 miles to Baker, NV a small town by the entrance to Great Basin National Park.   We are staying at the Whispering Elms Campground, Motel and RV Park - a small park with 24 RV sites and a 6-room motel.   It has lots of trees so we have lots of shade, which is good as it is hot here. We arrived here just before noon so after lunch we headed to Great Basin National Park.   The Great Basin is a large area centered on Nevada and stretches from California’s Sierra Nevada to Utah’s Wasatch Mountains.   It is named for its lack of drainage.   Its streams and rivers mostly find no outlet to the sea, and water collects in shallow salt lakes, marshes, and mud flats to evaporate in dry desert air.   It is not just one but many basins, separated by mountain ranges.   Great Basin National Park was created in 1986 to protect a small portion of the Great Basin.   We stopped at the Visitor Center and tried to get tic...

Monday morning, August 8 th , we headed east across Nevada on Highway 50.   The 287-mile stretch of this highway from Fernley to Ely was dubbed “the loneliest road in America” by Life magazine in July 1986.    It really is a lonely and desolate stretch of road and follows the Pony Express route across Nevada. Nevada is the most mountainous state in the Nation with 314 individual ranges and hills and we drove over a lot of them today.   We drove from Carson City to Ely in about 6 hours – the longest we have driven in one day all summer.   We are staying at the KOA in Ely, a very nice RV park but also the most expensive we have stayed at in a long time. We visited the Nevada Northern Railroad Museum in Ely.   This is a very nice restored rail yard with 66 original buildings and structures, 4 steam engines and about 6 diesel engines, and over 70 pieces of rolling stock. One of the volunteers gave us a nice tour of the engine house and shop. We enjoy...