Day 2 - Nevada and Utah

We wake up about 9AM, the parking lot is pretty much empty. After several attempts to light the stove to make coffee, Maggie suggests that maybe we have to push the kitchen out to make the stove work. We do. Yet another thing no one bothered to inform us about.

Breakfast made after the false starts we finally get out of the Fernley Flying J at the crack of noon.  Making fabulous progress so far.

Once you leave Reno, Nevada is pretty empty until you get to Elko, which has its own mountain and is an oasis in the near desert. We usually stop here on trips east or north, but this time just for petrol.

As daylight was starting to fade we reach the edge of Nevada and stop at Wendover. We make our first discovery. We are a truck. The truck side has water and free air for the tyres. The car side does not. Filling the water tank etc. takes an hour. We will discover all stops take an hour.  We did wonder, how do you get the air into the inside tire of the double tyres on the back. Something else no one mentioned.

Being in the west, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) owns a lot of land. Like the Forest Service, they have a lot of camping on their land. There is a great app that tells you were BLM and Forest Service campsites are located. As we basically live inside a national forest we knew this and fired up the app about 4 pm. 

BLM Knolls campground is about 20 minutes past Wendover (Campendium is another great app).
$10, pay by phone (there is just enough signal to do that).  Don't tell anyone about it. It's our secret.

It was a bit washboardy drive. There are three big parking lots with a nice pit toilet (as in concrete floors, nice building, clean) at each one. Maggie said (having looked at the map) that we should skip the first one and try the second one, farther from the highway, 

The second lot was perfect, big stone hills between us and the highway. No one there. A big sand dune in between that we hiked up in the moon light (did I mention the light was fading?) and the kids rolled down the sides of to great delight. We could see the 80 in the distance but not hear it and the stars were really clear, even by Tahoe standards. As the moon came up, we set up the picnic table, discovered we had three chairs for the four of us (there's an Ikea in Salt Lake City....) and had a fabulous dinner.  So far after 80 days (net) on the road, this first real campsite was the best one so far.

Our first actually cooked in the RV meal!

Location

Miles start

Time start

Miles end

Time end

Gal

$/gal

Total

Flying J Fernley	18,412.0	12:00:00 PM			14.78
Elko			18,665.0		31.447		$78.27
Wendover			18,779.9		16.3		$55.42
BLM Knoll	18,820.0	8:15:00 PM