Weird Signs

8/3/2016

You know, one of my favorite parts about the southwest is the signage on the highways. I’m not talking about just the billboards – though those are frequently entertaining or perplexing or both – but the highway signs. Those of you who don’t live in the southwest have probably never seen a sign that says “Warning: Dust; Next 32 miles” or “Watch for Elk; Next 83 miles” or “Strong Crosswinds Possible; Next 120 miles” or a personal favorite, “No explosive laden vehicles allowed to park in the town of Mina”. And you probably haven’t seen this weird thing called a “safety corridor”, which is basically a section of highway just like any other, except you have to have your headlights on and any speed infraction results in a double fine. I have yet to figure out why the safety corridor exists, or if it’s effective, or how they decide when to return it to an un-safe corridor, but it is fun to think about while I’m long hauling down I-40 / Route 66. It’s the little things in life.

The road from Vegas to Reno is, unfortunately, exceptionally long and almost entirely devoid of signs. There’s a sign right as you leave town that warns you of dust storms for the next few hundred miles, and then you just drive and drive and drive and look at a whole lot of nothing and some mountains. This issue was compounded for my drive because of the haze from the Californian fires, which rendered everything a fairly un-spectacular variation of gray or brown. Nevertheless, I found other ways to occupy my time, such as taking pictures of the same objects but from different angles.

For a while I considered the geology of the craggy hills and mountains that I was passing. I’m a geologist but have little (no) knowledge of Nevada geology, so I spent a while looking at rocks and trying to figure out where they came from and what their history was. It was also nice on my eyes, because the rest of the world at the time was blindingly whitish-gray-brownish-yellow, and I don’t have sunglasses.

Hmm yes, those do look quite rocky

But the road between Vegas and Reno is hundreds of miles long – it takes 7 to 8 hours to drive – and you can really only think about rocks for a couple of hours at most before other things seem far more interesting. So I decided to turn my attention to the matter of Jane’s temperature gauge. You see, I put in new gauges right before leaving on this trip, and the new temperature gauge has a highly accurate numerical readout (unlike the factory gauge, which gives you some general spectrum between “C” and “H”). Of course, this has caused me to have a heightened sense of awareness of the temperatures of the car because I can now see what’s going on. Imagine my consternation when I saw that temperatures were fluctuating between 192*F and 202*F, with no particular pattern. A few times I went up hills and the temperatures went down, and a few times I went down hills while temperatures climbed. Sometimes driving slower yielded higher engine temperatures, and sometimes driving the same speed yielded the whole 10 degree range. A truly perplexing issue! My gauge may not be entirely accurate, but I think that it is and I think that there is some inconsistency with the car. So I thought about that for 3 or 4 hours. And that was long enough to get me into Reno (though not long enough for me to work out the issue in my head).

A very odd giant light in the middle of the desert - so bright you could see light radiating off of it!

Is that a lake I see in the distance, or a mirage?

Huh, it actually is a lake. Very pretty - right outside Hawthorne and close to Reno

Is this a bunker?? Why are there thousands of them scattered all over the plains here? Military things... hmmm

All thoughts of my car’s potential issues, both imagined and real, vanished as soon as I hit Reno downtown. It is like hot rod heaven down here. I saw more makes and models and styles of cars in my brief time driving downtown than I ever have in my life. It’s a truly spectacular array of classic automotive history. And here I was with my dirty, dusty, muddy monster of a car. So I went to the hotel and checked in (an ordeal), got my room (an ordeal), and put Jane up for a while so I could take a break and get dinner (not an ordeal, surprisingly).

The hotel parking lot is like a car show in and of itself!

Well I never made it to dinner because I stumbled upon Reno’s official Hot August Nights cruise, which was an incredible sight to see. Hundreds of classic cars cruised down the main block surrounded by cheering spectators. Drivers had all kinds of fun things to entertain the crowd – costumes, candy, necklaces, music, or just a good old fashioned mean-sounding V8. Seeing everyone cruise around got me really excited to do some cruising of my own tomorrow!

All of the beautiful pristine cars cruising by incentivized me to clean Jane up, so I spent a few hours sitting in the parking lot cleaning and chatting with other car enthusiasts. I was out there until 1:30AM and it did not bother me one bit. Mysterious cooling issues or not, Jane did run me nearly 2000 miles to Reno reliably and happily, and she deserved to look beautiful. I snapped a couple shots of the difference between cleaned and uncleaned paint.

With Jane taken care of, I’m about to stumble off to bed – after resolving a few issues with my room – at the nice early time of 3AM. In the morning, I will meet up with some of my Californian buddies for brunch and then will do some real spectating! I can’t wait!!