Road Trip to Idaho (Day One)
Day one of a long, long drive in Emmett’s volvo. We started out about seven in the morning from my place in Mountain View, tossing a duffel bag each into the car and heading out on the 880 north.
We reached the Sacramento metro area about ten, in time to meet up with Emmett’s niece, Kelly, in Loomis, California, for breakfast at the local greasy-spoon diner. It wasn’t bad. She’s a precocious 17-year-old girl, getting ready to start her senior year in high school, with alot of promise. It was cool to meet her.
We headed back out onto the freeway, eastbound, climbing the Sierra foothills toward Reno. An unexpected surprise was lunch in Sparks. We stopped at Western Village off the freeway and had some lunch at the casino’s restaurant. Normally, I view casino eateries with a very healthy amount of skepticism. This one wasn’t too bad. Emmett liked his grub much better than I like mine, but it was quite edible.
The desert is incredibly empty between Reno and Winnemucca, the emptiness broken up by truck stop casinos and “PRISON AREA. HITCHHIKING PROHIBITED.” signs. After Winnemucca, 270 miles of empty desert. The sunset in the desert was nothing short of spectacular, especially in the empty sagebrush landscape of the high desert of Eastern Oregon. It’s really nice every once in a while to go to a place where you can look at the horizon, miles distant, and know that more people live in your apartment complex at home than live within your eyeshot out in the desert.
We arrived in Payette, Idaho, at midnight, some 14 hours after we left (Southern Idaho is in Mountain Time), talked to my grandmother for a bit, and crashed.