Tionesta CA to Rye Patch State Park NV
Got a leisurely start again this morning. Once we got everything packed up we headed out on the road. This time we were a long ways from a town of any size. We passed through one or two without seeing any sort of eating establishment. We finally got to Adin CA and found a great general store type place with a lunch counter. Since it was pretty much lunch time by now we had them make up some sandwiches. I noticed that their butcher block behind the counter was about 10 inches thick with the middle being an inch or two lower than the rest. That thing has seen some years and a lot of meat. While waiting for the sandwiches to get made John and I made our way around the store. The highlight for me was finding their collection of random sodas. Various sodas from all over the place, I'd only ever seen one of them before. I selected one for lunch and picked out 8 more to take home. I felt a bit silly packing up a bunch of sodas to carry them the rest of the 700 miles to home but I love a good soda. Apparently John has the same affinity I do and he packed up a few to take home as well. Luckily we had just enough room in the saddle bags and I'm happy to report all of them survived the trip to Orem.
Much of the ride from here was fairly uneventful. We stopped for our usual soda and fuel break about 30 miles from Susanville, I can only figure that Susan must have been some gal. We had seen a little offshoot of a road that looked like it wound through some mountains so we decided to take it. After heading down that road about 40 miles I pulled off to wake up a bit and got to thinking that we had been going a little too long without seeing our turn off. After reviewing the map we though we had missed the turn off about 10 miles back. After stopping again we realized the problem...the map had let us down again. We had just traveled 40 miles down the road in the wrong direction. The original road that we were supposed to take must have been named something different. We felt a bit silly after our 80 mile(round trip) detour to nowhere and I vowed to write a nasty letter to the map-makers. Though, I realize now I've since thrown away the map and I don't remember the publisher.
Eventually we ended up in Reno where I really had a hankering for some KFC. We ate and got back on the road to head toward Sparks. It took us about 20 miles and the highway ending for us to realize we had missed the I-80 junction while looking for KFC (oops, sorry John). We got down the road a bit and as the sun went down we watched the giant black storm clouds in the distance. We were headed right into a pretty big storm. We got as close as we could to make sure that we weren't going to miss it before we stopped to don our rain gear. A funny thing happened, in the time it took us to get our rain gear on, the storm split in two and we rode right through the clearing. We had literally just missed the storm about 10 min. down the road. The surface was still wet and the smell of rain was fresh in the air. In the end it was getting geared up for rain that kept us from actually riding in the rain.
We flew along I-80 in the dark for a couple of hours until we got to Rye Patch State Park, a reservoir about half-way between Lovelock and Winnemucca Nevada. We got there much later than we should have on the eve of a holiday weekend. This was after all one of the few bodies of water in the dry and rather boring state of Nevada so the campground was pretty full. We had some fun riding up and down some gravel hills checking out various campsites until we found one of the last few open spots, it may have been the last open spot. We parked and had barely turned the engines off when someone yelled at us to shut our lights off. We complied, it was 11:00 after all. A few minutes later, while getting camp set up, we overheard the same gent telling ridiculous stories in an apparent inebriated state. His little group was fairly boisterous and we were quite surprised to see a bunch of kids there the next day. Apparently, they didn't really care who they kept awake with their stories.
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