Leaving Gerlach’s Post Office Tuesday morning things weren’t looking too promising, but by Lake Winnemucca all was dry…

Wadsworth, Fernley, 50 east to Fallon…and east; the spaces between…

lunch near the old Cold Springs Pony Express Stop ruins, then Austin…

…Eureka [the spaces between]…

… gas in Ely as the sun goes down, eastern edge of the time zone…

Across the border in the dark to Delta for the worst Mexican meal ever. After a sleepless night punctuated by the intermittent roaring of an antiquated heater in the overpriced rundown off-season [if there ever IS a season, which I doubt] Day’s Inn we were up in grey dawn to drive 177 miles across the state seeking a decent breakfast; not something to be found in Holden, Scipio…

and certainly not “Mom’s” in Salina!   107 miles further got us to the Tamarisk on the Green River in Green River…

…where even in deepest Utah a grandmother cannot escape her daily grandchild picture.

A good breakfast, good coffee and low flat light with bits of wet across the eastern desert;

Crescent Junction, Thompson Springs, Cisco, Danish Flat, Westwater…

Just in to Colorado, Rabbit Valley, we let the dogs out…on the Trail Through Time…

Then Mack, Loma, Fruita, Grand Junction, Delta [that other Delta, where breakfast used to be ok, but no longer]; gas in Montrose and through the mountains [Cerro Summit, Cimarron] to a chilly meal of leftover omelette at Gunnison Reservoir;

Gunnison, Parlin, Monarch Pass – nice; dry and empty roads all the way; into downtown Salida in time to get some fine locally sourced foods from the Ploughboy [highly recommended]…

…as well as a cheaper better cleaner motel and a meal…this one, as the Laughing Ladies [also highly recommended] were closed, from the somewhat spendy menu of the strangely set up “Twisted Cork”; thousand watt lighting, unrelentingly perky service and bright clean decor reminiscent of an airport’s food court, which along with the aggressively loud Christmas-pop foreground music [“Jingle Bell Rock” anyone? Anyone “Dreaming of a White Christmas” out there?] seemed to spell “home” to numerous middle-life homies out on the town in their best fleeces and turtlenecks. The dinner was good, the atmosphere, well, extremely un-atmospheric…and we didn’t feel under-dressed in our two-day-old road clothes.

Back at the Super8 the internet was strange, but “Paris, Texas”, Louis Malle’s barely remembered cultish road movie with the extremely tedious ending was on TV; if that ending was any more tedious than the exasperatingly mannered bits we watched, well, the mind boggles. We tuned instead to idiot local news, slept with the heat off, turned it on at seven to warm the room and overslept, waking enervated to a stultifying seventy-five degrees.  Aired the dogs, breakfasted heavily at the Pancake Palace before finishing the grocery shopping, putting us down the Arkansas by ten [Wellsville, Swissvale, Howard] to leave 50 at Cotopaxi, climbing into Custer County for gas in Westcliffe, then 69 south through dry high interior valleys into Huerfano County and, symmetrically, the Gardner P.O…

Home to Libre by noon, dust trailing us up the dirt despite it being mid-December….

 

M