Our 100 Day Trek through the US of A, part 6

Graduation dates in Arco

From Yellowstone on our way to Yosemite we stopped at Arco in Idaho, the closest town near the entrance to the Craters of the Moon national monument. It is funny that throughout the west when you ride in a township you will find the first letter of the town, in this case the A for Arco carved into the mountain or hill that looms over the town.
In Arco as well as in other towns we drove through, if they have a high school you will find dotted all over that mountain in different height the year date of graduation carved and paint filled into that mountain. Arco is the county seat and in its incorporated 600 acres is home to about a thousand inhabitants. Its claim to fame is proudly mentioned on the welcoming sign to town: "the first town receiving electric light from a nuclear reactor". The test area for nuclear research is a few miles away.

Hope you can read this

It sports a park with swings and three motels 1960 style and three places where one can eat home cooked meals or pizza.

As you see we were early

After


registering at the 1960's type motel for room 4 out of 12, we drove to the craters of the moon entrance 20 miles away. A 600 plus square mile 15,000 to 2,000 year old lava field that had flowed and or erupted here, spewing or oozing lava during that period leaving a black landscape that is clearly uninhabitable.

 

You see here a lot of "AA": see lava flow picture

Intelligent flowering plants spreading out to distribute the water available to them

Pahoehoe formation

A 7 mile loop road brought us, since it was the right time of year, past scores of flowers that seem to thrive in this utterly desolated black landscape. The lava looked like a tilled landscape. There were spatter cones, cinder comes, lava bombs and lava tubes that flowed out of the earth called pahoehoe in Indian vernacular.

Fascinating were the colorful flowers and the lichen that enriched the fields stretching out as far as the eye can see. Photos will tell the story. But really, an hour did satisfy our curiosity.

Lichen a symbiosis between algae and bacteria

Lichen benefits - look them up in google

So back to Arco where we unpacked and went to one of the "we make everything ourselves wholesome places to eat", where Sandee had some kind of pot roast (definitely not Southern style) and the pickle for which the place was named. I asked for a rare "mooing" steak from the field beside it and baked potato. The cook sent me his version telling the waitress that this was his first ever rare steak, so he wasn't sure if this was how I wanted it. He had cut the steak to test the rareness. I am privileged to have eaten a first of his creations.

 

We left the place with a, of course, "homemade" rhubarb pie for enjoying in the room.
Sandee posed as Dorothy out of the Wizard of Oz on the big chair outside.

The next day we visited the hometown of one of our loyal readers, Linda, who was born on a farm in Wendell, Utah. She had alerted her uncle and aunt Jerry and Sally who still work their farm out there. Linda started working on the family farm and later in town from the age of six, milking cows and any other tasks allotted her even if it required a footstool to accomplish her job. Linda is still the most hardworking lady I have ever met. She and her aunt Sally are the same age and since farm families often had many children, I'm guessing Sally to be one of the youngest of  Linda's mother's siblings.

Jerry and Sally's home

Linda's hospitable family

These falls emerge from underground

We were shown the neighborhood and I got the opportunity to match names to the crops in the fields we had encountered during our trek. I can now identify alfalfa, and wheat and hay and corn in their infancy stages.

Sally and their classic car

It was late in the afternoon when we crossed into Nevada on the way to our hotel (still 100+ miles away) when our trusted "Hansie" (yes, we name our cars) showed his amber engine light. (But you  know all about this little issue already.) It made me realize that after a call into the nearest open dealership in Tucson, Arizona, and making a call for a service appointment in Reno, Nevada, both hundreds of miles away, that the "24 hour anywhere" road service from Range Rover would have been virtually worthless under these circumstances - AAA would have been no better. Their solution would have been for us to wait for a tow truck (coming from heaven only knows where) put us on the road to either one of those locations cozily wedged in the cabin of a tow truck for 6 to 10 hours, only to arrive in the middle of a Friday night. Otherwise, I guess they would have simply taken the car and left us on the side of the road.  Remember there were no tow trucks, mechanics, rental cars, or any other signs of civilization for miles around -- we decided to soldier on.

Nevada's Endless Roads

Some people vacation differently

 

How to adjust pricing in difficult real estate times

Typical Nevada Storms Brewing 

Cowboys at work while sheriffs stop traffic

Neighborly advice

Migrated Serbs living the American Dream

But they have minimum standards

Two overnight lodgings later on our last leg to Yosimite we visited a Ghost Town in California. I had been wanting to visit one throughout Nevada as there are quite a few of those in the deserts there. Bodie is a state park service protected "Williamsburg" like town, which had despite a lack of water, a large population of miners looking for gold. Bodey (towns people miss-spelled his name, sort of like Erik) himself was the first stake holder and died within a year never "enjoying" the town naming.

A gull in Bodie? It's hundreds of miles to the ocean

During the boom years from 1877 to 1880 5 to 7 thousand people lived here and 5 thousand buildings dotted the hills. Bodie had a newspaper, a Wells Fargo bank, 65 saloons, a china town, four volunteer fire companies and a railroad. The cemetery still shows the fenced area for the reputable citizens with a Chinese section. People of less reputable standing like ladies of the night and gun slingers were buried in nameless graves outside the fence.
In one of my next blogs I will write about Nevada which we traversed for two days, but since we will cross the state again on the way to Utah we will dedicate a story about Nevada then.

Posted with Blogsy