Today’s leg can be described very briefly: 50 miles east on Freeway 80, turn left in Wells and 65 miles north to Jackpot.
Though we were well supplied with tubes (sorry to refer to them again, but they are an incredibly large part of our lives!) I made an attempt with a repaired version, which I had to change after 30 miles. I am not sure if it was a fresh puncture or just the poor patches from Walmart, but now I am on fresh tubes and the hope is that we can focus on other things the coming days.
In Wells, we left Freeway 80. We had tried an alternative in the early morning, when we left Elko, a so called business route 80, but at some time it just ends in a cul de sac, where we have to lift the bicycles over a barbed wire fence and return to the Freeway. In DK, you would get kicked off, but here it is the only way to bicycle between some of the Nevada towns. At some road work, I even exchanged enough words with a police officer to understand that we should just continue.
We meet a lot of nice people here. There are some people we are not too fond of, though, and we have not met any of them. The first are the people shooting riffles and guns at the road signs. US road signs are iconic only until they have been bruised and battered by some hillbillies with too little to do. Another group of people we talk about are “the litterers”. Despite many signs demanding “No Littering” the road sides are some places used as waste bins by the drivers who apparently cannot have an empty bottle lying in the bottom of their car until they arrive at a rest stop. A special version of litter is the half filled bottle. Only with the same color as the original beverage if the bottle happens to be a Mountain Dew or other yellow liquid. We wonder if the this is mankind’s version of dogs’ marking territory. When you piss in a bottle and throw it out the window, you have left a marker that will last for months and probably years and proclaim that “Ed was here”.
As mentioned we left Freeway in Wells. Probably a good-bye and also a farewell to the Humboldt River and the Union Pacific Railway, we have been riding along many of the last miles. We had studied the map and were anticipating some watering holes before Jackpot but for safety’s sake we took a sandwich and some soda at a Subway.
There was absolutely nothing before Jackpot, 100 kilometers of dry mountains, sunshine and a nice tailwind. We thought we were here before 4 pm but looking at our clocks we realized that we had entered Mountain time zone. I know from Indiana that some states do have diferent time zones within a state, but it must be confusing that different counties have different time zones. Time difference to DK is now eight hours.
popscycletour.com 