We woke up early as today was Dinosaur day. We grabbed some breakfast, and Lisa begged me to take her picture with a John Wayne cutout. And then we headed out towards Berlin.


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From Nevada Travels, posted by Bridget Weaver Walden on 5/30/2011 (Showing 13 of 29 items)




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Berlin
Berlin is about a two-hour drive from Austin, and much of the road is not-paved. Berlin is now a ghost town where you can see the small, wooden houses and outhouses in front of the mine shaft. We took a tour of Diana’s Mine, which brought us into a silver/gold mine where we followed a quartz vain into the darkness. On the way, I also saw a friendly bat curled up, after a long night of hunting bugs.

Berlin is also home to the Ichthyosaurus State Park. I’ve been known to wear an amazing blue shirt with the saying “I dig Ichthyosaurus” across the front. I think this shirt may be the reason why Bridget started dating me, but she won’t admit it.

The tour guide was fun. He was really enthusiastic about showing off the excavation site. You definitely had to use your imagination, but we did learn about how large these creatures got.

Tire Bites the Dust

For 2011, this is the second tire I’ve had to change on a road trip. (Last one was on a wine trip to Sacramento). After passing the ghost town of Ione and taking some pictures, we began to make our way back to Austin. After about 70 minutes driving on the dirt road, we heard the thing that any passenger dreads to hear… “Uhmm… the tire pressure warning just went on.”

We jumped out and heard the tire’s air spilling out. Great. Luckily, I was not rusty on this, and we quickly started to switch things out. While I was letting down the tire, two guys came by on their ATVs. We joked a bit around with them, but one of the guys had an air pressure pump ten feet away from the road. Keep in mind, that in all of the 60 miles of desolate road that we travelled, we only passed maybe 10 houses, and luckily got a flat in front of the one with an accessible tire pump.

He filled the spare tire up a few PSIs to the appropriate pressure, and then he recommended we see Joe Ramos in Austin to fix the tire. Funny.  Obviously, flat tires are a common thing. The locals said that they’ve helped the FedEx people, UPS workers, and even the Swanson’s ice cream truck. “The Swanson’s guy only works on commission, but the Indians love their ice cream.”

Ely
Joe Ramos wasn’t around when we returned to Austin, so we continued on our journey. We got a quick glance of Stokes castle, and then got back to Highway 50. We decided to drive past Eureka and try to find an open tire repair shop in Ely. Ely boasts as the largest city on Nevada’s eastside, so we thought we would have better luck. Unfortunately, we were wrong. We checked three shops, but all we’re closed until Tuesday. Yikes.

A known fact is that pizza cures all frustrations. So, we stopped at All American Pizza, which we saw at the beginning of town. Bridget and Lisa then spread out a map across one of the tables, trying to find the mileage between the city and Lehman caves. I was surprised on a few different levels.

  • Maps? Really? Did they also bring a phone book to flip through the yellow pages to find a local diner?
  • Both of them started to exchange memories of when they were young and how their parents used to always look at maps. I think this may have been the main reason to bring out a map.
  • After not accomplishing much, in my mind, they did attract the attention of one of the pizza owners. This actually turned out highly in our favor.

We finished our pizza, and then the owner gave us a free slice of cheese cake. He then continued to talk about where we were headed. Lisa, with her long eyelashes batting down, told the story of our tire blowing out.

Before I knew it, the owner had looked at the spare tire, drove to his house, picked up a spare that might work for us, and gave it to us, wishing us good luck. Wow. One of the nicest things that a stranger has ever done, and all I did was check-in to his pizza place. We then walked down a block to the casino to get our passport stamped. Well, we were now ready for the next day ahead, with a slight rain falling on us.