12">It’s been 32 years since I first drove cross-country with Anne. One of the things I have learned about Anne is these 32 years is she is an expert worrier she is. We had trouble finding a 5-gallon collapsible water container for the camping phase of our trip. At the second REI we tried, we were told that they had all been sold out because there was high demand just before “Burning Man.” For those of you who don’t know what Burning Man is, my summary based on never attending is that it is a week-long mixture of Woodstock, and performance art transported to the Nevada dessert and updated about 40 years.
As soon as we got home, Anne went home to check the dates of Burning Man. It was ending the same weekend that we were driving through Nevada. Anne immediately began worrying that we would encounter hundreds of miles of traffic jams in Nevada as Burning Man emptied out. The fact that Burning Man was taking place 100 miles to the north of our route was no reassurance. There were limited highways in Nevada, and the few routes through Nevada were all likely to be clogged. The fact that Burning Man was not ending until two days after we passed through Nevada was similarly of little deterrence to this worry. There were sure to be thousands of people driving throughout the state for days to get to and from Burning Man.
Girded for traffic jams, we nevertheless braved Nevada’s byways. We crossed the border as night was falling. This was clearly not a fair assessment of Nevada traffic. We got up the next morning after the spending the night in the metropolis of Tonopah. Tonopah has been named the “best star-gazing town in the US.” This honor has been earned based on two things: the town is in the high desert at 6,000 feet. And there are no other towns with lights for about 100 miles in every direction. We woke up the next morning, ready to brave the hoards of Burning Man celebrants hitting the highway.
Here is a picture of the highway:
