Other than that, the drive from Reno to Vegas is mostly very long. It's hard to have any conception of just how big this country is, unless you drive through it-- after three days (not counting a few day-long stops) driving through all of daylight and into darkness, and we've only crossed a tiny portion of our route, just part of the north to south a little of the west to east. I sat in the van and stared at the map of the U.S. in the front of our road almanac, and realized that we still have nearly the whole breadth of the country to go.
And to think people did this on horses.
The land here can be beautiful--the rolling brown hills, the ragged multicolored rock hills--but after hours the expanses of brown and gray scrub tired our eyes. And the expanses are so long; on I-95, hours pass between each tiny outpost town. A few, like Luning, are ghost towns, or nearly, with hard-weathered abandoned houses and doublewide trailers, graveled roads choked with engines, appliances, and building materials between each small plot. All the houses are torn and broken, perhaps by the hard, constant wind. These places are beautiful to me, though ominous--wandering through Luning there was still movement and sounds all around us. In the empty place the wind bounced off a sheet of steel leaning against a post so that it made a shrieking, whining sound, curtains in open glassless windows flapped in the wind. Everywhere there was an impression of people, where no people were... Though some way behind the clearly abandoned area, we saw an RV parked next to a house that looked inhabited-- Who would live here? We wondered.
More photos of Luning to follow...
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