Well, we are on our way home. We left Marina around 6am in order to avoid the worst of the rush hour in the Silicon Valley and Oakland area. The ride took us to San Jose and then up the up through the east side of San Francisco Bay and onto Interstate 80 at Fairfield, east of Oakland. The first half of the trip was somewhat interesting as we traveled from the coast, east of to Sacramento and up the Sierra Nevada. Once we got past Reno, NV and entered The Great Basin, the terrain became high desert (about 4,000 feet) which was basically unchanging. Susie provided a one word description of this part of the route, "BORING."

Interstate 80 will be with us for almost all of our trip east. The stretch of I 80 from Sacramento, CA to Omaha, NE follows the historic path of the first transcontinental railroad. You can see the tracks alongside the road through a lot of the portion we completed today. The building of the western half of the railroad, particularly through the Sierra Nevada mountains, was very difficult. As you pass through the Sierra, you can see just how difficult it must have been with the technology of the 1860s. Anyone interested in reading about this task should read Nothing Like It In The World: The Men Who Built The Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869, by Stephen E. Ambrose.

Interstate 80 crosses the summit of the Sierra Nevada over Donner Pass at about 7,000 feet. Donner Pass is famous for what happened here in the winter of 1846-47. The Donner party became trapped in the pass during that winter and roughly half of the 80 people survived. Today, people intentionally go up to the pass for the ski areas.

Our overnight stop is Winnemucca, NV which on the Humboldt River in north central part of the state. A close look at the map of Nevada will show you that there are not too many towns of significant size in this part of Nevada, limiting the choice of stops. We won't have an opportunity to see what the town has to offer. We know there are casinos just like every other town in Nevada. I did learn that there has been continuous settlement in this spot since 1830. There was a trading post here in the 1840s that supplied travelers heading to California on the Humboldt Trail.