U.S. 50

US 50 across Nevada is promoted as "The Loneliest Road in America." Which made it pretty much a must do for me. I've actually driven this road before, but it had been a long time, when road trips in desolate places were still novelty and had not yet become nostalgia.

Stokes Castle in Austin

Shoe tree east of Delta

There's not much - in terms of people or water or vegetation - between Carson City, Nevada, and Delta, Utah. Just 470 miles of mountains, desert scrub, and dry lake bottoms. There are towns: Austin, Eureka, Ely, Baker. There are gravel roads heading off to ghost towns and mines. There are remains of Pony Express stations used for a brief season or two in 1860-61 before being rendered irrelevant by the telegraph (the original one of which ran along this route). I love this kind of road, bolstered by air conditioning and my confidence in the reliability of modern automobiles.

Sand Mountain

US 50 runs from California to Maryland (or vice versa?). It is the old Lincoln Highway, at least through California and Nevada (the Lincoln Highway followed US 30 east from Salt Lake City). Originally I considered driving it all the way from Sacramento to St. Louis, then driving north to Minnesota, but decided to mix it up a little. I did take 50 from Lake Tahoe to Colorado and on the return trip we took 50 from Lake Tahoe westward down to Sacramento.

In planning this trip, I had been determined to find a new route from Seattle to Minnesota, or at least one that differed significantly from the routes we've taken across Montana and the Dakotas so many times in the last few years. I guess I wanted to see if I could drive to Minnesota without driving through Missoula or Gillette or Dickinson!

I joked that I was adopting the "repositioning" used by cruise ships and airlines, spending the first day of the trip relocating to California and opening up a whole new series of route options.  We also returned two weeks later from Minnesota (Wisconsin, actually) via San Francisco, doing the same basic thing (different roads) on the way back.