Rain and Samantha's Excellent Adventure: Firefighters and Salt Flats

Samantha: In order to gain entry to Nevada, you must first cross Utah, around Great Salt Lake, and traverse the Bonneville Salt Flats desert. I honestly don't remember much of the drive up till the Salt flats, but that's okay, since a great deal of misadventure happened out there. First of all, it seems to take about 30 minutes to get all the way around the Salt Lake. It's pretty, and sometime I'll stop by its shores. Eventually, you begin to notice all that is around you stays the same (but not in that tedious Nebraska way) no matter how far you go. Then you're in the Bonneville Salt Flats. The roadside of 80 West along the Flats is speckled with names arranged in rocks and bottles, and at one point you reach this thing:

"The Tree of Utah, sometimes called the Tree of Life, is an 87-foot (27 m) sculpture that was created by the Swedish artist Karl Momen in the 1980s and dedicated in 1986. It is located in the desolateGreat Salt Lake Desert of Utah on the north side of Interstate 80 about 25 miles east of Wendover. The sculpture, which is constructed mainly of concrete, consists of a squarish 'trunk' holding up six spheres that are coated with natural rock and minerals native to Utah. There are also several hollow sphere segments on the ground around the base." (http://www.digplanet.com/wiki/Metaphor:_The_Tree_of_Utah)

It looks like this:

http://www.bbburma.net/Trips/2003_GreatSaltLake/index.htm

But before we reached the Tree, we pulled the car over (the concept of "emergency stopping only" so far out the window) and at first cautiously, then jubilantly trod into the Salt. It crunched and smeared under our sandals, so strange! Further down the road it was cracked and great pieces of it curled up into themselves.

We got honked at a few times, so we jumped back into the car, and enjoyed the sunset behind the mountains and across the vast stretch of, what is to us, very alien earth.

We arrived in Bonneville after nightfall, a town through which the Nevada-Utah line is drawn (denoted abruptly by a casino on the Nevada side), and stopped at what Rain calls "the second saddest Subway ever." It was totally packed with, what we learned, were folks in town for the Bonneville Raceway. Here's an interesting snippet about that: http://clui.org/ludb/site/bonneville-salt-flats-raceway

We got our food, then headed back to the highway, fully intending to continue west, but instead due to the dark and poor signage, merged onto 80 East. The next exit was at least 34 miles away, so Rain pulled over, and I took control. My first great idea was to drive the wrong way on the shoulder of the east bound back down the ramp, but we had definitely gone a few hundred meters too far to do that, so I parked her, walked over the median to see how the deep the dip on either side of the highway was, walked back and floored it through the salt. Our wheels spun the gunk everywhere (it felt like driving in greasy snow) we fishtailed for garnish and ripped onto 80 West. It was all I needed to do to cement my blossoming, hidden desire to become a rally racer, for future reference. Rain promptly asked me to marry her, because I'm the manliest man she's seen in a long time.

Rain: It's true. Samantha is not just the manliest man I know, she is also the BAMF-iest BAMF* and I will be exceedingly proud to take her hand in marriage. This excursion happened shortly after sunset, and we still had a good few hours of driving ahead of us. Giddy in the afterglow of the little stunt we had just pulled off (video coming soon), we giggled our way across much of Nevada (which, our host that night helpfully informed us, you will pronounce correctly if you start off with the phrase "ne-vacuum") until we arrived in the town of Winnemucca a bit after 1am. We had driven over 800 miles and 15 hours that day so we were very glad to finally drag ourselves into the house of Lucas, the son of an old friend of my mother's. Since Lucas is a firefighter and it's wildfire season right now, Lucas had gotten off of work not too long before and was busy cooking some food when we got there. He told us some stories about his job (with fires started by everything from lightning to drunk drivers) and we chatted a bit before all hitting the hay. We got up early again in the morning as we still had another 400 miles to go before we finally hit our destination of Grant's Pass.