A Weekend In Reno

The thing about experiencing a road trip is savoring each moment. Some people warned us about Highway 95 from Boise to Nevada. It's the stretch through Oregon that is a nightmare. I have to explain, because I loved everything about the drive.

Blue sky, feathery cirrus clouds, vapor trails that interwove the sky into a thing of beauty. It's something you see only in summer, when the weather is warm and a hint of green still lies scattered about the landscape.

People warned us that the drive was boring. It wasn't. The scenery reminded me of lava ledges and rolling hills on our family ranch. Cedar trees and sage dotted the landscape.

A badger crossed the road two or three hundred yards ahead of us, but it may have been a bobcat. It was too small for anything else, and it moved differently than a rabbit.



The animal was too far away to recognize the brown speckled coat of a bobcat,

which in the desert is sometimes
almost orange. The animal was, however agile, which leads me to believe that it was a cat.

The lava ledges, while sometimes similar to what I remember on our family acreage in Northern Utah, was also occasionally different.

Some jagged ledges were eroded like teeth on a saw blade, almost like the hoodoos in Southern Utah.

I loved the scenery. Just after leaving Boise, I put on the Beatles on my I-pod.

It played for the next five or six hours, beginning with Abbey Road. By the time I finished listening to Beatles '65 and Help! and a few other early albums, we switched the music to some other favorites.

By then, it didn't matter.

I was just watching everything about me.

The advice was wrong about the landscape. It was beautiful. What they were right about was the Oregon side of the road. We passed at least four or five state patrolmen. The speed limit was 55 miles per hour, which was agonizing, but it went by quickly.

Great tunes and scenery helped it along, but the big thing was looking forward to seeing family in Reno. Three grandchildren squealed and laughed, when we talked to our daughter in Reno. By then, we were only hours away. 
We arrived. Ann drove the last two hours. I was too exhausted to drive any further. As usual, I overdid it in Boise. The day before our departure for Reno, Ann had meetings, so I swam and worked out in the exercise area.

I swam well over a mile, and actually was halfway to the second one when I finished. Before I swam, I did a quarter mile on the elliptical machine and some curls--fifty reps with a smaller bar on each arm.

The next day I was miserable. I always do that. I think it's my impatience to get my body moving like I want, but the plan never works well.

I spent the next two days taking it easy, but I still was able to enjoy the little ones. I just couldn't do the walking. I'll do better next time and avoid last minute attempts to exercise.

Regardless of what anyone says, a road trip to visit grandchildren is better than anything imaginable. It's the memories.

And there are always new ones to find, like the sound of crickets outside: something I haven't heard for years. Even crickets know better than settling in a place like Idaho Falls, where temperatures reach 20-30 degrees below zero. The toad in the backyard is a plus too. It's not a chorus like where the kids lived in Minnesota, but it's still fun.