on monday i coaxed my sore body back into the car for a cross-nevada adventure. i decided to take the road less traveled, rather than head northeast on i-15 to salt lake city. so i plunged into nevada, heading as directly towards lake tahoe as i could.

since i was out of books on cd, i cued up the this american life episodes i’d downloaded on my laptop, only to discover that the laptop speakers were overwhelmed by the road noise. hmm. so i put on my headphones and cruise controlled along (i had an adapter that allowed me to power my laptop via the cigarette lighter). i quickly learned winamp’s keyboard shortcut for pause (it’s the “c” key) when i needed to concentrate or answer the phone.

those 600 miles just melted away. most of the time i felt like i had all of nevada to myself. a lot of the time my view out the windshield looked like this.

until i crossed paths with this ominous and intense front that brought the only precipitation i had experienced during the trip thus far.

and then things were pretty much back to looking like this.

and this was a funny moment. i got hit by some tumbleweed. this only makes sense if you realize there were these gale force winds and all of a sudden something might just shoot out in front of the car and roll across the highway. this time it came in at an angle directly toward me and got stuck. both the car and the tumbleweed were not injured.

then before i knew it i was in carson city, the state capital, just east of lake tahoe. i stayed at this really nice resort hotel and casino on the north shore, but only left my room to check out.

the next morning i was torn between hiking around lake tahoe and just getting on the road. going hiking for a few hours seemed almost like killing time with my “destination” only a few hours a way, so i decided to keep moving in hopes of beating sacramento’s rush hour traffic.

and now i’m here. tomorrow morning my things arrive, so i’ll unload the trailer that i so carefully packed a week ago and start moving and settling in. then next week i start at o’reilly.