All Night Drive—Destination Utah

The final event of Bob’s Porsche 356 Event was the awards ceremony (where the Wisconsin contingent once again did terrific—people don’t love it when we show up en masse). Upon his return at about 10:30 PM, we re-assessed our plan of sleeping until about 3 AM and taking off across “Loneliest Road in America”—Highway 50 from Lake Tahoe across Nevada to Utah. We had no alarm clock and I had already been sleeping since about 6 PM, having literally dropped into a deep sleep after our 30 hour, 667 mile trek from Truckee to Guerneville (to see Grandma Julie) to Placerville (to see Pattie and Max) and back to Truckee that Daisy wrote about.

Our assessment was that since Bob was awake and I was rested, he should drive us to Reno (while I rested a tad more) and then I should take over. Then while he slept, I’d drive as long as I could. And so we took off. I can report to you that Highway 50 really is the loneliest road. From just outside of Reno in the town of Fallon until you reach Ely, almost all the way across the state, there is NOTHING. I’m grateful that we did it at night. The road was essentially straight and, but for the random trucker, not only was there nothing, but there was NO ONE. My solution to fighting off sleepiness was a small bag of Dorito chips. When I’d feel a bit droopy-eyed I would take a chip and bite off the smallest little bits at a time—there being only this one bag. Something about the act of tasting and chewing woke me up every time. (Any nutritionists out there…what’s the deal with this??) Now usually I can ‘disappear’ one of those small bags in about 30 seconds flat. This night however—there of course being only this one bag to last me all the way across the state of Nevada—it lasted me about 4 ½ hours.

Note to Self: take small bites when eating Doritos in the future.

At the end of this night of driving and just before dawn, Bob awakened and we discussed our options: head two hours southeast to Cedar City, Utah (our destination for the night, which would require us to drive 2 hours back north again the next day in order to get to Bryce Canyon) or head straight to Bryce Canyon (a 5 1/2 hour drive). We opted to just head to Bryce Canyon, this being the most efficient (and zero backtracking) option.

More about that adventure in my next post!