Day 45 - Monday, 8/3/09, SETTLED

Out to breakfast. Corinne is craving French Toast. Bob has packed egg salad sandwiches for lunch. We plan to use one of our gift cards for Macaroni Grill for dinner in Reno.

We're not gamblers, so the fact that there are slot machines even in the grocery stores does not tempt us. The gigantic columns outside the Atlantic Casino are impressive.

The big thing out West is to identify your town by painting the first initial of the town on the hillside so passersby will recognize where they are.

For someone like me, with a fascination with hay bales, I've certainly gotten my fill here. There are walls of square hay bales, pyramids of hay bales. There are no silos, just stacked outside in humongous piles. Not even covered by tarps or plastic.

We visit Sand Mountain Recreation Area. The road is more than corrugated - more like a washboard. The sand was blown there 4,000 years from a lake that dried up, hundreds of miles away. Then the sand was trapped by the mountains and couldn't go any further.

This area was used by the Pony Express in 1860 - 1861. There are ruins from lava rock buildings that were used to shelter the Pony Express riders.

There are kangaroo rats and a giant jackrabbit with huge ears running among the lava rocks.

Above our heads Navy planes from a nearby base performed drills. They repeated touch-and-goes. We saw helicopters using their FLIRR, infra-red capacity.

I so hate to be hot that I would rather wear Keanes sandals and get hot sand in my toes than to be closed up in hiking boots.

Since I have no sense of direction, nor am I a one-trial learner of place, I rely on Bob to be my guide. While I spent a year working on the wedding, he spent a year working out the skeleton of our trip. Now we have the freedom to take it day by day, stopping at interesting architectural, geological or historical markers along the way, and even staying longer in one place overnight if we need to.

I should come back from our trip looking 10 years younger. Every day in the desert is like having microdermabrasion treatments to your skin. When we come home from a day of hiking, our skin is full of salt and sand.

I like to think I'll keep off the 5 pounds I've lost, too. Besides the constant activity, rock-climbing, sand-walking, trudging uphill at high altitudes, there is the fact that since I'm not watching TV at night, I'm not so tempted to snack.

Dicky-Du and his Zydeco Krewe come from LA to Reno to perform at a small club. He's the son of Roy Carrier. The audience is small but appreciative. We are grateful we can do some zydeco after 6 weeks away from our favorite kind of dancing.

One of Dicky-Du's roadies wears a L'il Anne and the Hot Cayenne t-shirt. L'il Anne is a local zydeco performer who is one of our favorites. We feel right at home.