Winnemuca is my new favorite city in Nevada...

The drive to Salt Lake City was better than I thought it might be. I left late (~6:30) and it took 14 hours and 15 minutes door to door and I lost an hour to Mountain Time. But over all the drive was good. Traffic was reasonably light and the major cities in Nevada are spaced perfectly for a drive across the State.

There was snow at Donner Summit and it was overcast the entire way across Nevada. Which was good as it kept the heat away. I could see it raining off in the distance through much of Nevada and it finally caught me the last 45 miles of Nevada - off an on, not too heavy. However, I did see a rainbow that was over the highway. It is very faint in the picture below. It starts on the left side of the highway and is climbing over the highway. It is about a third of the way up the sky over the highway.

Winnemuca is now my most favorite city in Nevada.

While I was finishing up my college work at USF, I tended bar at a Basque Restaurant in SF. It was called Elu's Basque Restaurant. Owned by Louis and Marie Elu. Louis cooked and Marie ran the front of the house. It was great fun. They were very kind and generous people.

The Basque people are from the mountains in Spain and France. They were mostly sheep herders when they came to the United States. There used to be quite a few Basque restaurants and hotels in Nevada and California. Usually they had a hotel with the restaurant for the people staying in the hotel. Many of the hotels had permanent guests as well as transient guests.

The various Basque Communities in the US would have picnics or festivals each summer, basically to get together with family and friends and have a big party. Good food and lots of wine! At the summer picnics, they would have games of feats of strength. For example, they would lift a 40 pound ball of granite, roll it around behind their head and put it down. Then pick it up again, roll it around their behind their head and put it down. They would see who could do that the most times. Another contest was picking up a 100 pound block of granite to see who could lift that the most times. The Basques are very proud and macho and many of the men were built like those blocks of granite they would lift in competitions.

One of the largest summer picnics was in Winnemuca, Nevada. The Elu's would attend every other year or so. I had heard so much about it that on my current trip I was going to make it a point to stop in Winnemuca and have a look around. Fortunately it is about the half way point between the Bay Area and Salt Lake City and I hit it about lunch time.

Winnemuca itself is about a mile long and 3 blocks wide - like the Basque people - short and stout. :) It does have 5 Casinos and 1150 hotel rooms. Quite a lot for such a small town. The first billboard I saw along the road I saw was for the Winnemuca Inn so that is where I stopped to have lunch. The change from lunch was $5 and some change. Being tired of sitting, I was in no hurry to hit the road, so I found a nickel slot machine with 5 pay lines that only allowed 1 coin per line and put in the $5 change from lunch. I was playing $0.25 per pull of the "1-arm Bandit", and it was the old time pull the handle type of slot machine. It had 3 reels that you could see spin with the pull of the arm. Not like the new $0.01 slot machines with their electronic reels that do not spin and let you play up to 20 pennies on 30 different pay lines so that you are actually playing $6 every time you "pull the handle". Yes you can play only 1 coin and only 1 pay line but that does not pay off very well and if you hit a jack pot you will be kicking yourself for not playing the max. So I found a machine I could afford.

I started playing and it paid a little and took a little and then - ding ding ding ding Winner! Winner! Winner! I hit it for 1550 nickels. Not so much but it was better than losing the $5. And I still had 74 of the original 100 nickels I started with! Yeah! It was time to leave Winnemuca.

A short while after entering into Utah, I came across the first of the RoadsideAmerica.com locations. That is the picture with the tennis balls on it. There is no explanation of why, but on the RoadsideAmerica.com site for Utah there is a little information about this location. And since Salt Lake City is the Capitol of Utah, I went the first night and took a couple of pictures of the Utah Capitol lit up at night. I was afraid I might not have the time on Wednesday to get pictures of it in the day light and lo and behold that was very prophetic. But more on that another time. It is 12:45 AM here and need to be on the road by 6 to get to Glacier National Park on Thursday, another 14 hour drive.

Thanks for coming along for the ride.

Talk to you soon...