Geocaching in the Desert
Last November when we stopped in Beatty, Nevada for the night we stayed at the Motel 6 and we were very unhappy, so this time we booked a room in the Death Valley Inn and RV Park. It is pretty much a standard motel accommodation, but it was leaps and bounds above the Motel 6.
Side Note: Turns out we have been pronouncing the name of the town of Beatty wrong. We have always pronounced it like it looks, ‘beat-e’. We had stopped at a quick mart just north of Las Vegas and while Donna was chatting with a tribal police officer outside the store waiting for me to fill up he pronounced it ‘bait-e’. Later, when we checked in at the Death Valley Inn, I asked the clerk how the town name was pronounced and he confirmed it, ‘bait-e’.
Also, the last time we were here, we ate at Mel’s Diner for breakfast and we weren’t very happy with it either. So this time we tried the Denny’s inside the Stagecoach Hotel & Casino. While this is pretty much a standard Denny’s, the food was leaps and bounds above Mel’s Diner. The big problem with this place is that you had to walk quite a distance through a casino that still allowed smoking and it smelt it.
Side Note: When we ate at Mel’s back in 2018 and it was run by a kindly old man and the food was great, but by last November a different younger couple had bought him out and their food was below average.
Today’s drive was similar to the Loneliest Road in America, AKA US-50, in that it is 300 miles of empty desert with a couple of 100 mile stretches where there is no place to get gas. It was very dissimilar in that there was copious traffic in both directions, including about 25% of it being 18-wheelers that needed passing.
We had a couple of geocaching travel bugs that needed moving along, so I picked out a few caches with regular sized containers to find, and it didn’t take long to drop one of them. We stopped at the first cache only 40 miles north of Beatty.
The photo above is of the CX-5 from that cache that was about a 100 yards off the road. That CX-5 had just passed the 26,000 mile mark 32 miles back.