Two major events today – I spotted my newly planted tree was crawling with ants. That means one thing – aphids. Two hours of inspecting leaves and killing them.
And another non-working day that ended up with a lot of work. Providing a set of legislation for a country – I enjoy helping countries improve their safety standards.
Tonight was apparently the last “clap for the NHS” night. I live on an ambulance route. Around half of the clap nights have seen an ambulance pass. It sort of changes it from “we are all doing this to show unity” to “thank you, the two crew in that ambulance driving past”. I understand for a lot of people the whole thing seems a bit empty now, but for me I will be out next week. But I will wait for the first ambulance before I clap.
I enjoy the USA, there are a lot of really nice people there. Genuine nice. I was reading last night that Imperial College have predicted that the latest relaxations in the USA will result in 200,000 more deaths in the USA over the next 2 months. I guess that means I will not be visiting the USA soon. In fact there is a real probability that if the virus spreads this much in the USA it will be years before I get a chance to go there again.
The other thing that happened today is that my photobooks arrived. When I opened it I realised that 4 years ago yesterday I did started a road trip of the American mid-west. So I thought that, over the next few days, I would take you on a tour of the USA with me as it happened day by day.
So today I will cover the 27th and 28th of May 2016. Day 1 took me from Las Vegas to a town called Tonnopah.
One of the reasons for avoiding the direct road was that I wanted to visit Rachel, you might remember it from the film “Paul” (the black mailbox and all that). Most of the way there was desert.
Quite a desolate road, and night by the time I reached Tonnopah. In Tonnopah this is one of the tourist attractions, they call it Bob’s Big Boy Burgers.
I saw no aliens on the way. in fact I didn’t even see any odd shaped aeroplanes. I met a guy in Rachel on a previous visit (a sponsored bike ride from San Francisco to the Olympics in Atlanta – I drove the support truck). He ran a memorabilia shop, area 51 t shirts etc. I talked to him about whether he really believed in aliens. He said absolutely not, but he collected stories from visitors looking for them and sold them key rings, t shirts and other stuff. He was aiming to create a walk in flying saucer. Rachel is 120 miles from anywhere (imagine having to drive 120 miles to fill up your tank with petrol!) so he needed to find a way to make money. People seem so keen to be misled, and he was willing to make money from it.
On day 2 I did a much longer drive – and boy was that a desolate road!
Again I avoided the direct road because I wanted to see both Mono Lake and the ghost town at Bodie. But there was also the large Turtle made out of rock at Fernley.
Mono Lake is an interesting bird life area. The water flows in, but not out. As a result there are brine shrimps living there which encourages migratory birds that feed on them. You can see the odd structures sticking out of the water (the water level has gone down since some of the incoming streams have been diverted to Los Angeles). The next stop was an old ghost town called Bodie. I spent ages there exploring old buildings, churches etc. Fascinating place to walk around.
One of the odd things I found was the rock turtle in Fernley. It really is big – 5m high. This is part of the Burning Man art park, but more about burning man later.
I then drove along a really desolate road, through the Black Rock Desert, past the town of Empire, which is pretty much becoming a ghost town since the gypsum mining failed. I eventually arrived at Gerlach. There you find Bruno’s X (replace X with hotel, restaurant, casino, bar or whatever you want be the look of it). I had made a booking by phone. No booking number, just “okay”. So I was a bit nervous about whether I had a room (the nearest alternative was not really driveable). But no problem. I had to eat at Bruno’s – nowhere else within 100 miles. But the food was superb – I can see why they say it is the best in three states.
Gerlach is the main town in the Black Rock Desert. They nickname “Centre of the known universe”. Every year they create a temporary Black Rock City to support the nearby Burning Man festival. That interested me, but the picture on the wall interested me as well.
I often wonder if the Channel 4 railway tracks were filmed there.
I think I like the desert. There is something about finding a place away from everybody, away from the noise and business, to just recharge the batteries – and heat feels good to me.