We left Page about 9:45 yesterday morning. Toto was driving, Josh was in the back and I was navigator. I set to work writing the blogs for the previous two days as I knew I had a ton of time on my hands. Toto wanted to go through Zion National Park on the way home, though she swore she wouldn’t stop for longer than it would take to snap a few photos. When we got up to the turn off it was closed. She was very disappointed. Ten years ago when we had been in this neck of the woods, we hadn’t gotten to go to Zion either. Our trailer was too large to fit through the tunnel into the park without guidance, which they provide, but not at midnight. We had continued on to our other destination and Toto had been disappointed then too.
Somewhere on the highway in Nevada, we came across some plant life that we feel a certain affinity for: Joshua Trees. Of course we found a good sized one and took Josh’s picture with it.
Now, what I am about to tell you didn’t really happen. There is no proof of it ever occurring, no pictures and certainly no physical evidence. Think of it more as the wandering imagination of three very delusional people who have been trapped in the car for way too long together. After taking the picture with Josh and the Joshua Tree we had gotten in the car and driven on. Two or three minutes later Josh made some comment under his breath about stealing a Joshua Tree. Somehow, and I am not sure how, we convinced Toto to turn around and backtrack about a mile (I will xplain why we had to go back in just a moment) until we found a small Joshua Tree that Josh could dig up. The tree in question was about 18incehs tall. Still is I suppose. Josh was rooting around in the back of the Tahoe for something to do said digging with, and all he could come up with was a hammer. So he and I went trotting out to the chosen tree (it was about 50 feet from the road): him to dig it up and me to NOT document it with the camera. Josh and JT (what we have subsequently named the thefted tree) got to know each other really fast: JT poked Josh in the forehead. I was a little behind Josh on the trip to the tree and all I heard from twenty feet away was “OUCH!!” and saw Josh clutching his left eyerbrow. After recovering from JT’s initial defensive move, Josh attempted to remove the soil from JT’s roots with the hammer. This did not work. Josh was the one to get violent next. He kicked JT near the ground a few times from different directions. This was apparently what JT had been waiting for because he came loose from the soil rather rapidly. Josh then picked him up by the trunk, and RAN to the car because there was a car coming towards us. JT is now apart of the family. At one point, Josh said “If he wasn’t so prickly, I would sleep with him.” Then Toto replied “He can’t help being prickly kind of like Kansas can’t help but be boring.” We did have to hide him when we crossed into California though, we didn’t want anyone to think he was a deformed pineapple.
Now the reason we had to turn around to go find JT is thus: somehow in nature, trees and shrubs know where to grow and not to grow. As we were leaving the photo site (where Josh and the big tree had been posing together) we were on a downward slope. Right before Josh made the suggestion of stopping and acting like a kleptomaniac, Toto had made a comment about how flora (plant life) knows where their lines are (where to grow and not to grow). It was like the light came on and she just said “It’s like the Joshua trees know where their line is…Josh, you should know where yours is too...”
When we were at the International UFO Museum and Research Center on Wednesday, we had seen something about a highway in Nevada called the Extraterrestrial Highway.
I had immediately asked Toto if we could drive down it. Of course she said yes. So we were heading towards Nevada and this highway that went past Area 51. One of the highways we were on in Utah was a horrible road. It had the tar to fill in the cracks all over it. We determined that this must be how the government communicates with the aliens. They write them messages in the roads and we humans can’t see the grand scale of it so we just assume they’re fixing the roads.
Well ok so they really are just fixing the roads, but maybe that little bit of crazy talk will make it into the “facts” of some of the crackpots who are always going on and on about aliens spout off. We made it to Highway 375 (the aforementioned Extraterrestrial Highway, or ET Hwy for short) in the early afternoon and had a blast by the sign at the beginning. I realized about twenty miles before this that I did not have the X-Files theme song, so I used what little service we had on the wifi card to download it from iTunes. I told Toto and Josh that we were going to listen to it the whole 100 miles of the ET Hwy; I don’t think they believed me. Boy did I show them. About a mile down the ET Hwy was a bright silver metal Quonset hut that had a gigantic metal alien in front of it. It was a store of some kind. We did not go in as it was closed, which we found out by sending Josh up the hill to it on foot while we waited in the car. Right as he was walking back a Jeep pulled into the parking area we were in and asked him a question. We didn’t hear it but when he got back in the car he said she was Geo-Caching. Geo-Caching is like a scavenger hunt using GPS. We went on our way. A few miles down the road we encountered yet another car that was pulled over on the side of the road. Geo-Cachers. We saw them every few miles for the entire 100 miles of the ET Hwy. Let me give you a little geography lesson about the part of Nevada we were in. There were mountains and hills and valleys in between. The hills weren’t all that tall, neither were the mountains, but they were much more mountainy than the things Kentucky calls mountains. We would drive over a pass and come down into a valley and be able to see for what felt like forever. The highway was long and straight and flat, and we would make bets on how far to the other side of the flat stretch. The first was seven miles. The next was closer to 14. It was very beautiful in a desolate sort of way. We encountered this sort of terrain for a while until we found a pick up on the side of the road that was completely smashed in the front. I started making up a story about Al driving home from Rachel (a tiny town I will explain later) from his step daughter’s birthday party and all of a sudden he gets abducted by aliens. Right as I was getting to what I would have called the good part, we were approaching something on the side of the road. Toto thought it was a bag of trash because it was black and one end was flapping in the breeze and I thought it was something dead. I was right. It was a dead cow, but there was something flapping on it, a buzzard. It was all bloated and kind of gross. About 300 yards down the road we found another dead cow on the other side of the road. Because we were so bored, we actually backed up and took pictures of both of them. Upon the reproach of the second cow, Josh inquired “Where’s it’s head?” This was a very good question. I had rolled my window down to take the picture, and was therefore holding my breath, but when I looked at it, I couldn’t see the head. When we got to the other side of it (we were driving rather slowly) we discovered that the head was completely under the body of the animal, obviously its neck was broken in the impact that killed it. Then I realized what REALLY had happened to Al. He probably was driving down the road late at night a few nights ago (on his way home from his stepdaughter’s birthday party in Rachel), and we think this cow was waiting on the side of the road for unsuspecting drivers with a friend because she was depressed. As a final hurrah in her life she had decided that she would commit suicide but jumping in front of a car. Her friend was there to help with the timing. “Wait for it….Wait for it…not yet....NOW!!” and then she jumped in front of Al’s truck. He probably clipped her after swerving to try and avoid her. Then he looked back through the back window, and when he looked forward again he was face to face with yet another depressed cow that had determined now was the right time to jump as well. I mean, if I were a cow and lived in that area, and did nothing but wait to be abducted by aliens or be slaughtered, I would be depressed too. I don’t think he had time enough to swerve to avoid the animal and hit it dead on. Then in his shock he probably was only able to drive half a mile before the truck pooped out on him. Then he would have gotten out of the vehicle and started hiking towards home, and this is when the aliens got him. He was already in such shock he probably thought it was his wife who he had called to come get him after the accident. If you are sick and twisted (like us) and you want to see said pictures of the deceased bovines, feel free to email me, but I am not going to put them up here. If you are wondering why the cows were near the road, it is because the whole stretch of the ET Hwy is open range land. Now the funny part is that there was an episode of X-Files that involves dead cows, though it was a brief involvement, but Toto was adamant that there was.
After that excitement, we found the town of Rachel. It is seriously tiny. Almost as small as Point of Rock, but it had a few more trailer homes and a diner. The very first part of it you see is desolate and looks kind of deserted, like a town that Mulder and Scully would encounter on one of their cases so we had to take pictures. Then we found the part with the diner which looks a little more occupied, but not much. Across the highway from this little town is a broken down and dilapidated something, possibly an old mine of some sort. Next to it was a bunker looking thing. We told Josh to go investigate, but he decided with where we were (nearish to Area 51) and the creepy music playing and the weird looking little town next to us (where the locals were probably cannibals and ate unsuspecting outsiders) he wasn’t getting out of the car. We snapped a picture from the road and left in a hurry.
About halfway down the ET Hwy we found a heard of cows. Sure enough two were nearish the road. Thankfully they were brown and it was daylight so we saw them and did not hit them, wreck our car, abandon it in search of help and get captured by aliens.
We had meant to see Area 51 as we traveled along the ET Hwy yesterday. I didn’t expect it to see way to get into it, but I figured I would at least see a chain link fence and a no trespassing sign. I didn’t see either.
We finally got off the ET Hwy and I turned off the X-Files theme music. We turned and headed down highway six. A little while later there was a rest stop and next to it was this huge rusty metal thing. When I say huge, I mean HUGE. Probably 15 feet tall and 30 feet across. It was almost a half circle shape. Toto made a comment about it as I got out of the car to use the facilities, and somehow between the two of us we spaced taking a photo of it. So I do not have anything to show you. Ten miles later or so we were nearing civilization. Right before the little town was a gravel road with a missile next to it. About half a mile down the road was what looked like the other half of the weird metal half circle. Toto wouldn’t go down the road because it looked all forbidding and scary so we just settled on not knowing what the fink it was (we hypothesized about it being a UFO).
A little bit later we saw something amazing. We saw our second “Orange Squeezer Thingy” of the trip. We had commented to ourselves (Toto and I at least) that we had seen a serious lack of them this trip; I mean we had seen them all over the place when we were little. So when we saw this, we had to switch lenses on the camera to the mega-zoom lens because it was WAY off the road. Then 20 miles or so later as we were nearing the California border, we saw yet ANOTHER ONE!! We were psyched! Just now as I sit here writing this we made a connection…we saw one in Hermiston near the army depot up there. And now we saw two in Nevada near Nellis Air Force base and Area 51 and the Nevada test site. So maybe they have something to do with the bases?
Toto had been going on and on about Mono Lake and the neat little things that “grew” on the shores of the alkaline lake in the Sierra Nevada’s all day. She really wanted to get up there and show it to us. She had seen it when she was my age, and thought it was super neat. When we got there, she said to me “Well, that’s not how I remember it. That’s not real exciting.” And that was it. We were done there. We had dinner in Lee Vining at a little joint that had a soup and salad bar with FRESH and HOMEMADE stuff, so Toto and I enjoyed homemade white bean and ham soup and piles of freshly chopped salad for dinner. No salad mix there (unlike all the places we ate in the south). It was a very nice change.
We ended up staying in Minden which is just a little south of Carson City. Got there about 11:30 and Josh went right to bed. Toto messed around on the computer a while then crawled into bed next to me. I was up till 1:30 or so uploading pictures and finishing posting the blogs for the prior two days (the internet card had been being wonky yesterday in the car so I couldn’t upload photos on the road).
Playlist
Nickel Creek
Paramore
TATU
Don McLean
Patty Loveless
X-Files Theme (for 100 miles)
Three Days Grace
ACDC
Don Henley
Dierks Bentley
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