When we were about 15 miles from the Holiday Inn Express in Carson City we could see ahead of us very dark clouds and quite a few streaks of lightning. At hotel arrival I noticed a lot of white along the curbing and in all the cracks in the parking lot. Upon closer inspection I noticed that they were pea-sized white balls of ice. When I asked at the desk, “How long since it hailed?” The desk clerk said it was about 15 minutes back. Glad we missed it.
We didn’t miss a repeat of the scattered showers from yesterday though, for almost all of the second half of our drive along US-50, AKA The Loneliest Road in America, we were being rained on periodically. We had another disappointing lunch in Austin, NV because the Champs Burger truck was once again closed.
Afterwards, we were zipping east and Donna noticed on the map a notation of the geographic center of the state of Nevada not to far off US-50. The gray line meant it was dirt road, but it didn’t look too far, so what the heck. She pulled up a web page about it and it said that there was a road labeled “To Belmont” at about 26 miles from Austin. We saw no such road going south so I pulled over and looked at the map too. Where the map showed the gray line right near it was a picnic table icon. I said, “Oooh, I remember a roadside pull off with tables several miles back.” We turned around and went several miles back to that spot and sure enough there was a dirt road heading south called Monitor Valley Road. Nothing about Belmont but we headed down it. After a mile or so it was getting a bit too bumpy for our tastes, so we turned back to US-50 to continue on the Carson City. We did vow to rent an SUV for our next trip so we could go the whole 12 miles to the coordinates listed on that web page.
A few miles shy of Middlegate, Nevada the Mini crossed off another milestone on this trip, thirty seven thousand miles.