It was a little chilly this morning, but it didn't take long for it to warm up, so that was nice. All night we could hear trains way off in the distance and just in the time we were packing up and making breakfast we must have seen 3-4 trains going in different directions. We had our oatmeal and then got back on to Old Rt. 66 and continued riding through another never ending valley. After a while, we came to the "town" of Essex, which doesn't really have anything in it except a couple old buildings and a little tiny post office. This was one of the towns that was booming in the 50's. As we kept riding, we were drawing closer to interstate 40. The train tracks had also gotten closer to the road at that point. Just like this morning, the trains kept coming. Right after we crossed under the I-40 bridge, only about 17 miles into our ride, we saw something amazing-- a gas station that was open!! As we got closer, we could see a whole bunch of fountains in front of the station. We knew they would have water! At that point, we weren't out of water, but getting to re-fill all the empty bottles made it so that we wouldn't have to worry at all about running out of water before we go to Vegas. The gas station also had a little cafe where you could order food. We thought about getting a bag of Doritos for a snack, but since they were 6 bucks a bag, we decided to order 3 orders of french fries instead since it would be cheaper and it would be enough to keep us full for a while. We had a pretty long break, so we decided that would be our lunch break unless for some reason we got really hungry. Within the first 5 miles of leaving the gas station, we saw our first tarantula running across the road. I couldn't believe how fast it was! I said, "Look Joey, there's a tarantula!" He said where... and then next thing we knew he ran over one of it's legs because he didn't see it. Despite having a crippled leg, the spider started running back across the road in the opposite direction, still pretty fast. To make me feel better, Joe said he "ran over it to protect me," even though we both knew it was an accident. A couple times today we had a little "flashback on rt. 66" because there were old cars cruising down the highway. That was pretty neat to see just because it's such a historic highway. Even though the first 16 miles seemed to take forever because they were all on a slight uphill, the next 16-20 miles flew by! Again and again, we saw trains, so many trains. At one point it was less than 5 minutes between when one train would pass and when we would see the next one off in the distance. It was pretty amazing because you could see the train in it's entirety way off in the distance. As it was going by, you could look all the way down the road and see train cars and look behind you and see train cars as far as you could see. Eventually we made it to the intersection of Rt. 66 and 95, which would take us into Nevada and close to Las Vegas. Once we turned, we had a little bit of a tail wind, but were going up a slight uphill for quite a while again. We knew from the turn that we wouldn't have to ride more than 20 miles from the border of CA/NV. That was our goal for today, to get into Nevada. After a while, we came around the corner of a hill and could see the border off in the distance. We could see the color of the road change and could see the state signs. As we left California after quite a long time, we crossed over a set of cattle guards into Nevada. We've never crossed into a new state like that before. From there, we took our usual picture at the sign and then continued on. The road was nicer and even turned into a 4 lane road with a nice big shoulder. About 3 miles into the state, we found another gas station! By that time we were pretty hungry, so we decided to have our sandwiches for dinner at the bench outside. Having our sandwiches saved us in terms of not having to cook, which saved us on water, but because it is just so dry, our bread was rock solid by the time we had our sandwiches today. The sun was already going down by the time we were done with dinner. We figured we would ride for a few more miles and find a place to camp. The only problem was that since we got into the state, there was a fence off the side of the road about 50 feet, which would make it so we couldn't get very far away from the road. There were no trees or anything, so there wasn't a way to really hide ourselves. However, as we were riding, we saw a sign that said "rest area." From where we were, the rest area had a huge building along with a whole bunch of little shelters and picnic tables. When we got there, we found out that the rest area was closed. It looked brand new and probably wasn't finished yet. There were barricades blocking the driveway, but we could easily go around them with our bikes. We tossed and turned around the idea of camping behind the building, but since that would be the only place to "hide" we decided to go for it-especially since no cars would be coming in because of the barricades. We rode around the barricades and around the back of the building, which we found out was a huge bathroom house. There wasn't any water on yet, and everything was indeed brand new. We tucked ourselves away in the corner behind the building and felt like we would be nice and safe there. Although we would be camping on rocks, we figured we would be ok since we have our sleeping pads. There were also some great picnic tables close by along with security lights around the building. It was nice not to be sitting there in the dark. We're getting excited because we only have a couple more days to get to Las Vegas! Our miles totaled 62.16 today.
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