One of the cultural icons of the northern California coast is the skunk train. I think even when I lived in California there wasn’t a road across the coast range in the Mendocino county area, and the only way from inland to the coast for dozens of miles north to south was from the town of Willets (where we were staying) to Fort Bragg over a one-track rail line that used small diesel engines to pull very short trains. The smelly diesel fumes gave the train the name “Skunk”. There’s a road now, and the skunk line is a tourist attraction. We went over to the station and patted one of the cars, but didn’t have time to ride.
Going east from Willets we soon (well, after some waiting for flaggers at road construction spots through the hills) came to the town of Geneva, on Clear Lake. California doesn’t have a lot of lakes, at least not that I know of, not the way Maine has a lake around every other corner. Clear Lake is a big one. Geneva is right on the shore and the road went along the lake for several miles. We stopped at a park downtown and got a good look at hundreds of western grebes that were hanging out on the water.
It was still too early in the morning to go on a winery tour as we left Geneva. There’s no sign “last winery tour on your route,” and we were hoping to see another one, but we were out of luck and out of the wine country.
Coming into the Central Valley, we saw a sign for Colusa National Wildlife Refuge. Arlene quickly checked in the AAA tour book, we made a K-turn, and we did the three mile auto tour of the refuge. We saw deer (had I mentioned that we saw several deer from the road on the late-evening ride to Gualala? I didn’t think so. But by this point mule deer were nothing new) and turkeys and several herons and egrets. There were lots of fields below the level of the dikes we were driving on top of; obviously there would be big flooded areas covered with ducks in the winter.
We stopped for lunch at a chain restaurant, Red Robin, in Yuba City. Ever hear of Yuba City? Me either. It’s one of those places that just shows how big the population of California is. In Maine or Nevada or Idaho it would be one of the five biggest cities. In California I doubt it makes the top 100.
It was the most comfortable temperature I’ve ever experienced in the Central Valley. Normally I’ve been there in the middle of the summer, when we call the whole valley “the bake oven.” Other times, you reach the top of the last range of hills, start down the other side into the valley, and hit a wall of hot air that feels as though you’ve opened an oven door. I asked a waitress at the restaurant, and she said, yes, it had been hotter recently but it was pretty nice today. The people at the restaurant, strangely, didn’t have much idea of how to get to I-80 eastbound.
Somewhere off I-80, once we got to it, we stopped at a California welcome center. It was hard to find (there were a couple of signs right off the exit, but the place itself had a sign that was hidden in shrubbery) but very welcoming. The guy in charge pressed a map of Nevada on us and encouraged us to take a leaflet explaining the Labor Day weekend closing of the Bay Bridge eastbound deck (150 miles behind us at that point) for renovations. The idea was, that was the best time to close the bridge to get three straight days to work on it without disrupting commuter traffic. We had been seeing signs about it in the Bay area. The guy at the welcome center said, “Please take one! They dropped off a box of ’em and we won’t get rid of ’em until it’s outdated!” So we were able to tell someone heading that way all about it a day later.
We stopped at a rest area on I-80 right at the summit of Donner Pass. There was a lovely half-mile trail there where you could get a little quick idea of the Sierra Nevada. We saw some chickadees of a species we don’t get in the east (chestnut-backed? I forget). The steller’s jays that were everywhere around our condo (or Millie & Joel’s condo) at Tahoe didn’t show up. But I highly recommend that trail if you’re heading east on I-80 towards Nevada.
We filled up the gas tank at a Petro truck stop in Sparks, just past Reno. We’re used to places not allowing smoking indoors, but wide-open Nevada will have none of that. The place was a smoker’s haven.
It’s taken me a long time to warm up to Nevada. It’s a lot of land without much for an easterner to get a handle on. What I remember from the first time I was there, when my mother drove us kids to our new home in California (my dad was already out there working), was going along a straight flat road through the sagebrush for about 20 or 30 miles, then winding up a range of hills and down the other side for five or ten miles, then another 20 or 30 miles of flat. I remembered that as going on over and over. That’s the basin and range topography. I-80 doesn’t do that, except for going over Golconda Summit; it pretty much stays on the flat all the way along the Humboldt River (not that you can see a river much of the time) most of the way from Reno to Wells. There are always mountains somewhere in sight along that route, and there are trees when you are in the mountains. Mostly there’s sky and sagebrush. You can get an idea of how deserted most of the landscape is when I tell you that the highway signs are likely to say “Next exit 10 miles, no services,” or that the icons telling you what services are available at the next exit include something that looks like an envelope — I think that means that the upcoming town is big enough to have a post office. And that’s along I-80.
We had originally been hoping to get to Elko, but it was starting to get dark when we hit Winnemucca. We figured that was far enough, looked for the motel that sounded most likely from the AAA book, saw its “no vacancy” sign, and phoned our second choice. When the next town big enough to have accomodations is another 50 miles, you don’t just drive on and keep looking. Well, when you’re students driving back to college maybe, but not at our age. We had dinner at the Red Lion next door, a good place to get something like a steak or big hamburger.
