The remainder of our Nevada holiday consisted of driving from Tonopah back to Reno, where we spent the last night at the Plaza Club Resort Hotel, and then a sprint across the Sierras back to San Leandro.
Monday's breakfast in the Tonopah Best Western featured homemade cinnamon rolls (every afternoon, a couple of platters of homemade cookies appear as if by magic.) A large proportion of guests are young men, away from home for a week or a month to work on mines or roads or construction; they take their time over breakfast so that they can chat with the kitchen staff.
Leaving Tonopah we spent a few minutes driving up the hills out of the center of the tiny town, where many houses clearly show the benefits of loving care, with new paint and some gardening. There are a few new motels including a couple of national chains. A distillery is in operation. So Tonopah continues to push ahead, slowly.
We remember the visits from our previous residence in the desert. The desert still spreads out as a vast and empty space of valleys and mountains. The traffic is mostly semi-trailer trucks such as Amazon Prime, Federal Express, food delivery to diners and markets along the highway. We wonder what projects we would be undertaking, what groups would we want to join if we had chosen to continue a desert life.
Hawthorne appears just the way we saw it last, maybe a decade ago. The entire miles-wide valley around Hawthorne is dotted with ordnance bunkers, wide spread so that one failure (which has happened once) could not cause another. In the old casino we spied a couple we had seen in the Best Western this morning and said hello.
Fallon, where the Navy does interesting work without much publicity, continues its missions but most of the nearby territory is occupied by farmland, dry now but preparing for alfalfa hay ranching in the spring. We are aware that many of the trucks passing us are semi-trailers pulling heavy-looking mysterious cargo carefully wrapped in black tarpaulins. A lifetime ago we once would have been more interested and knowledgeable about that cargo, but no longer. The highways along this route are well maintained and built for truck traffic.
Now that our excursion is almost finished, we know that we are aware of the differences between the parts of Nevada. Mining areas are boom-and-bust, with towns turning to ghost towns rapidly whenever a mine is closed, and springing back to life if mining returns to profitability - it all depends on the market!
But ranching is different. Many Nevada ranchers come from families who have worked the same land for generations, and their neighbors and merchants are descended from their ancestors' old neighbors and merchants, so life seems to stand still, more so than in urban California. There is a quietness to being so settled.
We spoiled our last day on the road by failing to stop for breaks for four straight hours of freeway driving. Our bad! Bob paid for it with a very stiff neck.
We first visited Nevada in 1965 on a whirlwind month-long circle tour originating in Cambridge, driving from Salt Lake City to Reno in two days. But our love of the western deserts began in 1970 when we moved to Whittier, California and soon began to spend weekends in the desert. We were fleeing the crazy Los Angeles megalopolis and found isolated desert spots to hike and hunt for colorful rocks to tumble. Nevada was an attraction because it was relatively empty of people.
Most of those spots that were empty in the 70s are still empty today. (Pahrump is an exception). But we're slower and less athletic today and not equipped for camping and hiking. And Nevada is growing rapidly today, filling up with California retirees who can no longer afford to live in California. We enjoyed our two-week vacation in Nevada, but probably will not take another one soon!