Sourdough Saloon, Beatty, NV
This was tonight’s dinner spot in Beatty, NV, where I had a couple of Sierra Nevada Pale Ales to wash down the six salt & pepper wings.
It was a 400-mile day with roughly 100 miles of I-40. I usually despise I-40, but today’s experience was really rather nice. Maybe because it was Saturday, the semi-truck traffic was fairly quiet, and the Arizona DOT has taken nice care of the road. Unlike the Texas and New Mexico sections, those are awful. And kudos again to the AZDOT because they are building a small bypass around Kingman, because that I-40 West to US-95 North interchange has always been brutal.
Another road trip day, another dam. My plan was to stop at the Hoover Dam visitor center to buy a postcard. It was an adventure; it is more like Disneyland now. There are now TSA-style inspections for the car and then once again on you to get in to see the exhibits. It’s $10 to park, and then they wanted $15 to get in to see the exhibits. At the entry to the visitor center I balked at the fifteen dollars, and a nice lady said, “No worries; if a postcard is all you want, they are in the gift shop, which has no entry fee.” And guess what? They didn’t actually have postcards in there. After getting back in the car, I stopped a couple miles down the road at the Hoover Dam Casino, and at first all I saw were the holographic cards at $4.50 a pop. I eventually did locate the regular ones that were priced at a buck a piece.
The worst part of the drive was getting to the other side of Las Vegas. It is like 20 miles of 5 to 6 lanes with usually 1 or 2 under construction. Everybody is in an absolute hurry; it is marked either 65 or 55, and I was running at 75, and I was the slow one. It is kind of a nightmare. And this is why Donna and I started not going through it by taking US-50, AKA the Loneliest Road in America, to get to Santa Fe.