Changing Course

We are in Carson City, at the Nugget Casino (map). The Nugget has a separate lot for RV parking, and allows stays of up to three nights. Normally, we would have driven a bit further today, to around Fallon or so, but we have friends here, and we had a nice dinner with them at B'Sghetti's restaurant here in town.

We stayed at the Horizon up at the lake until around 2 in the afternoon, enjoying the cooler mountain air. Things were much quieter there than they were last weekend, when the parking lot was an absolute zoo on account of the celebrity golf tournament going on across the street. Either there are more rabid golf fans than I realized, or plain folk were hoping for a glimpse of Kevin Costner, or maybe Maury Povich.

Our plan had been to head east from here on US50, an old favorite of ours. However we have a friend in Henderson (near Las Vegas) who is in the hospital with cancer, and we just got word this evening that she may be able to have visitors. (Awaiting that word was another reason why we did not head further east today.) So we are changing course, and tomorrow we will head over to US95, which will take us south to Las Vegas. I expect to be there Sunday afternoon.

From Las Vegas we will head northeast through northern Arizona and southern Utah, rejoining our originally planned route in southwestern Colorado.

Our other friends made it back to the bay area safely, where they commented that our blog did not adequately reflect what a good time we all had. So let me state for the record that we really enjoyed riding the speedboat, taking the paddlewheeler cruise of the lake, horseback riding, hanging out at the beach, visiting the Tallac historic site and the Lake Tahoe museum, watching the girls learn to water ski, and just generally being quintessential tourists in Lake Tahoe. Also, we had a great time around the campfire, barbecuing, making s'mores, and "camping" with them, which is a very different experience than our daily life here aboard Odyssey.

I don't have a real update today on the smoke/power problem. We had a short grade from 6,200' to 7,100' coming out of the lake basin, and I noticed perhaps less smoke, but still felt like we were short on power. But after that, the bulk of our 25 miles today was downhill -- US50 runs at a 6% grade for over nine miles. Now that we are back down at 4,200', I will pay careful attention tomorrow to any improvement from the somewhat denser air. With new fuel and air filters, I am running out of things to try short of disassembling the bedroom to get at the turbo.

Photo by Pål Sigurd