Day 54 – Fallon to Carson City

We’re in the home stretch. We can actually see California tonight. In three more days we’ll be at the Golden Gate Bridge. Crazy. I think we’re all ready to wrap up this ride and maybe do some mountain biking for a while.

Anyhoo, it was a beautiful morning in Fallon. read: the wind wasn’t blowing like a hurricane. It was supposed to be a relatively short day to Carson City (61 miles) so I had Terran suit up and join me for the first part.

TireCheck

Riding out of town on 50 was nice… a slight breeze but sunny and cool. We were making good time until we had to make the turn to Carson City around 10 miles in to the ride. Then our fancy road with a nice wide shoulder turned to a 65mph road with zero shoulder and a fair bit of traffic. Those kind of roads make _me_ nervous, and I could tell Terran was dreading heading down this stretch of highway.

So I called Heidi and managed to get her before she left the hotel. Terran and I looped back and got 20 miles total before we got to the hotel. The boys needed haircuts and I needed new bike gloves, so we decided to just drive to Carson City and I’d ride more in the afternoon.

I’ll spare you the drama… I never got the afternoon ride in but we did get a lot of pre-California errands taken care of… plus we had In-n-Out again so we had a nice post-lunch food coma. 😉

In the afternoon, we scouted tomorrow’s ride. We head south of town ~30 miles, then turn to head up and over Carson’s Pass. It’s a 21 mile climb… Should be interesting.

Along the way, we went through Genoa. Genoa is apparently the first real settlement in Nevada (they claim to have the oldest house in Nevada and the oldest saloon. Why someone would have waited until they got this far west before putting up a house is beyond me, but maybe they couldn’t afford the real estate prices of Tahoe so they settled down in the valley).

Genoa

Genoa is filled with interesting history. Like this “hanging tree”. I thought it was called that because of its shape or something. Upon reading this plaque, turns out it got the name for a different reason. Yikes.

HangingTree

Tonight we picked up some food at the grocery store so we could have lunch in the MCC tomorrow. In the parking lot we saw what the MCC would have looked like had we made this trip back in the 70’s. Don’t they look cute together?

PastVNow

BTW, JP and Art are back with us. JP is back from his event and Art is back from a few days vacation up in the mountains. As much as the Potters like Colorado, Art may be hooked on Tahoe.

Tomorrow, California! I’m excited for the state line, not so excited for the 21 mile climb that lay just past it. Wish us luck.  Also we’ll provide the details of our arrival in tomorrow’s post for those in the area who are curious.