Once again, we were up at 7:45, and despite the Garmin's valiant but futile attempts to find me a place of coffee procurement, we managed to get out of Salt Lake City by about 8:30. EK and I are both still on Eastern Standard time, so early for here still felt like 10:00ish for us. We caught a glimpse as we headed out on I-80 of Antelope Island, which is a pretty large chunk of mountain land that's just chilling in Salt Lake, and apparently filled with antelope, and then we were heading into the salt flats. Flat and bright white, and kind of incredible, we spent most of the morning speeding along I-80 and enjoying dodging around small mountain ranges and looking at the rock graffiti/art that people who had come before us took the time to stop and create.
As we made it through and began to climb into the mountains, we hit the Nevada border and continued our journey through the high desert. From the Nevada border until we hit Reno was, in all fairness, an awful lot of the same topography; high plains, scrub brush, and the occasional set of mountains to dodge around. We saw dust devils hundreds of feet high sprouting up across the large patches of scrubby valley, and every so often a lively town built around a rare (very rare) river. 500 miles and some change later, we began to see long patches of scrubless dust, until suddenly, Reno and elevation. We plowed through Reno and on towards the California border, ecstatic over the sight of trees slowly cropping back up here and there until finally, wending our way along the Truckee River (several or twelve times) we hit the border.
I'm not knocking on Nevada, but the difference as we hit California was palpable. Once again we found ourselves in the mountains, this time with towering pine trees and greenery ( a welcome change). We were stopped at the agricultural station a few miles in, and it was about this time that we got a message from EK's friend in San Francisco, that, if we had time, we should hop over to Lake Tahoe for the hell of it. It's vacation, we thought, and we weren't going to make it into San Francisco in time for daylight or dinner as it was, so we decided why not.
The ranger at the station was very helpful, and mentioned that King's Beach was a lovely place to visit Lake Tahoe, and we nodded and continued into historic downtown Truckee, which was a pretty delightfully quaint little town, all terraced houses and shops and snow, and a nice main street area set up. After a brief stop, we hopped onto 89 and made our way down to Tahoe City, then took 28 as we drove along the edge of Lake Tahoe, ogling the multimillion dollar homes that line the lake until we got to King's Beach. King's Beach was everything the ranger had promised, and we spent a good twenty minutes snapping photos and staring, mesmerized, at the water and the mountains, and vistas just as spectacular as anything we'd seen prior to this point.
About now (maybe 6 or so), we decided we should probably decide on food and maybe look at the map again, to see that we had made an inadvertent half-loop down and around, and we weren't that far from Truckee. We got on 237, and wound our way back up from the 4200 feet Lake Tahoe rested on, to about 7000 before leveling out and getting dinner at a fantastic pizza joint in Truckee again, called Village Pizzeria. With delicious pizza and a very oddly shaped root beer, we were back on I-80, going past Donner Gap and snow drifts that had to be taller than EK and me, put together, cut into to make room for the road.
We wound our way through the Sierra Nevadas, experienced Emigrant Gap (the valley through which a lot of the first Euro-centric settlers traveled into California), and some more truly phenomenal scenery before I-80 began it's descent out of the mountains towards Sacremento. Sadly, by this time, it was mostly dark, so our view as we dodged around Sacremento and then as we headed into Vallejo and Oakland was limited at best, but it was some kind of surreal to see the hills covered in lights in the dark.
After a few more Garmin mishaps (like the difference between 880 and 580), we managed to get off of I-80, and into West Oakland around 10:30 pacific, where we cruised around the block for a bit, waiting for EK's friend to get back from work, so we could get in and get out of the car and eventually to sleep.
Our route for May 5th, total around 700+ miles:
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