Day 5 – Bryce Canyon, Utah to Austin, Nevada

This morning there was a coating of snow on all of the cars and trees. We decided to head briefly back to Bryce Canyon to check out the hoodoos with their frosting of white powder. It was very magical, and very cold. We knew we had a long drive in front of us, so we didn’t stay to see the majority of the park. We will have to return another time to spend a couple of days in the park and fit in a good hike or two down into the canyon, as we hear it’s a spectacular experience.

After leaving Highway 12, we found that the drive north on 89 was just as scenic, with portions of it following beside a river and passing the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Southern Utah gets big points in our travel book. Our plan for the day was to head out on Highway 50 west, what used to be the major trans-continental highway, also known as the Lincoln Highway.

After driving on major highways with a speed limit of 75 mph, it seemed a bit out of place to enter onto Hwy 50, one of the straightest and most deserted stretches of road yet, and have the speed limit be posted as 65 mph. Lauren was driving, and didn’t quite adjust her foot pressure to the new speed quick enough – we were barely started down the road when she got pulled over by a Utah state trooper. She pulled over, and the trooper approached the car. “Miss, is there any particular reason why were you traveling 76 mph?” “Uh, no particular reason. I’m sorry.” “Can I see your driver’s license?” Much searching around pile of stuff in the back of car for purse, behind ice cooler, under jacket, next to Cheez-it box, aha, there it is. Searching in purse, pulling out books, there’s the wallet, no license, where is the license, phew, there it is bent in the bottom of purse where it’s been since she took it out for the security checkpoint at the airport the week before. The trooper disappeared with this, plus my registration and goes back to his car for some time. He was gone so long we were sure he was writing up a ticket, but he finally returned with our documents and a friendly reminder to Lauren that the speed limit here was 65. Thank you Mr. Trooper. That would have put a real damper on the trip. As it was, we both paid very close attention to the speed signs for the rest of the trip.

Highway 50 through Nevada follows the old Pony Express route. I love this quote from a help-wanted poster for the Pony Express: "WANTED. YOUNG, SKINNY, WIRY FELLOWS. NOT OVER 18. MUST BE EXPERT RIDERS. WILLING TO RISK DEATH DAILY. ORPHANS PREFERRED". The Nevada tourism commission has decided to capitalize on the fact that a Life magazine travel writer called this stretch of road the loneliest highway in America, because there is nothing to see or do the whole way. So now tourists can get Highway 50 Survival Kits either online or from the commission and get a passport which can be stopped at the towns along the way, and after your trip you can mail in the stamped page to receive a commemorative “I survived Highway 50” certificate, bumper sticker and lapel pin. Lauren is really jazzed about the pin. Not! I don’t believe she owns anything with lapels.

Our thoughts on Highway 50: There are certainly stretches that are very lonely. Other than the small towns that are spaced sometimes as much as 100 miles apart, there is not much going on. However, I was impressed by how beautiful the drive was. I wasn’t expecting all of the mountain ranges we would pass through, which gave the drive a lot of variety. We would drive through a long, straight, shrub-covered plane, with nothing but a few cows for visual interest, and then climb over another curvy mountain pass. We must have crossed five or six ranges through Nevada, which really helped to break up the drive. As for the towns along the way, we can’t imagine what those people do for a living, or entertainment for that matter. Except that everywhere we went seemed to have a casino of some form or other. After all, this was Nevada.

By the end of the day we were getting pretty loopy, something akin to cabin fever. We had listened to all of our cd’s to the point of being tired of them, and most of the time we couldn’t find any radio stations to tune in. We would put the radio on scan, and it would spin round and round the dial finding nothing. Once we lucked out and got to listen to a Terry Gross Fresh Air program on NPR, an old interview she did with Kurt Vonnegut which was being aired to commemorate his death that week. Then we crossed a mountain range and we were alone with ourselves again. The lonelier the road got, the sillier we got, and we seemed to have no trouble sending each other into fits of giggles. I think that part of the road trip experience wasn’t about the road so much as being with each other.

The second town along the road, Eureka, was very quaint and homey-feeling. We decided to stop at a little diner to get our passports stamped, and to treat ourselves to an ice cream cone. This just seemed like the kind of town where a soft-serve cone would fit in with the ambience. Unfortunately, we’d never had worse ice cream in our lives – terrible texture, no flavor, we took one lick and both dumped our cones in the garbage. Then we drove out of there fast in case anyone inside the diner was looking! We headed on to Austin, where we were to spend the night, dreaming of soft-serve.

We determined that we would get a replacement cone, and crossed our fingers that the second one would be more tasty. It seemed to be a good omen when we saw a sign for a diner in Austin as we approached town that had a picture of an ice cream cone on it. We stopped, got our passports stamped, got two vanilla cones and licked. . . .. yum! As it was almost dark, we drove the two blocks to the other end of town where our motel awaited. We had to laugh when we pulled up – it had five rooms and a verrrrry rustic look to it. When we got our room we realized this would probably be our least favorite night of the trip – it was basically a mobile home trailer, with two small rooms each just big enough for a bed, with dark paneling on all the walls, those old mirrored tile squares in some places in an unsuccessful attempt to lighten the place up, and light fixtures that had low-wattage fluorescent light bulbs that only managed to give a dim, grungy lighting. We were kind of afraid of the (imagined, we couldn't see well enough to verify our suspicion) lack of cleanliness of the bedding, so we both decided to sleep in our clothes. In fact, Lauren slept on top of her bed, with a blanket we’d brought along in the car. I thought about eating the night’s $50 charge and finding another place, but the only other motels in town looked about on a par, or maybe even worse.

The day’s lesson: you can’t judge a town by it’s ice cream. We would have been better off staying at the Day’s Inn in Eureka.