Beatty, Nevada

We have stopped in Beatty, Nevada for the day, which is near Death Valley. It's still early so we're going to go tour some ghost towns. That's about all that's around here. Cactus and abandoned gold mining towns. The one that we're going to see now, Rhyolite, has been abandoned since 1919 but I guess some old Westerners were filmed there in the 1920's. I'll post some photos later.

We were going to do Zion National Park this morning, but lo and behold, it was snowing again and all the mountains were fogged in. We'd already been through this scenario in the Grand Canyon and didn't think it was worth the disappointment with Zion. So we'll have to do both Zion and Bryce some other time, preferably not in February.

On our way here, we stopped in Las Vegas to go to In 'N' Out Burger. Did you know that they have a secret vegetarian option there? If you go to the secret menu on their website, you'll see that they carry a grilled cheese sandwich. Quite good. It had 10,000 Island dressing on it, which you wouldn't think would taste good but it did.

We are staying at a Motel 6 tonight. It was the only hotel in town, aside from a couple of sketchy places, one of which Jim claims is called "Grandpa Chuck's." In order to get an ethernet cable, you have to put down a deposit of $10 (I don't think they've heard of wireless internet yet). When I was registering, the receptionist told me where "the restaurant" was and where "the gas station" was. I think that's because there's only one of each. When we walked into the room, the shade was down. Jim said that if we pulled up the shade and saw an alien outside, we weren't staying here. But no aliens, at least not yet. This place is so deserted and is near Yucca Mountain, where they're burying all the radioactive waste, that we wouldn't be surprised at seeing odd things around here.

Why, you may ask, are we staying here? Because we are so damn tired of sitting in the car!!!!