Head North To Go West | The Run To Reno

After a great few days of relaxing and not driving at Mom’s house – I decided to start plotting out the next leg of the trip: getting to Reno before Thursday morning.

There are two critical components to this adventure: route, and accommodations. You would think the route part is pretty easy, plug in the destination into Google Maps, and off you go. In an EV, you need to factor charging. Tesla makes it easy; it’s all in the car. However, the route may not be intuitive; it will seemingly place you on what seems an out of the way road, but the computer is factoring speed to destination with places to charge. What may be a 10-hour drive time could be an 11 and a half hours with the stops.

While it may seem odd for Tesla to take me North to go West, the routing was actually serendipitous as it would provide another opportunity to have breakfast at the Luxury Dinner (they were closed on July 4th on my way down from South Dakota). It’s important to note that I really don’t know much about the place other than it being around since 1926, and it just looked cool with the Wyoming Motel attached to it. You can only imagine what that place has seen over the decades.

I get to the diner, they are open and I am just soaking in the place. With its bright red neon ’Luxury Dinner’ sign on the inside with red booths, this place a throwback in time. Coffee and breakfast awaits.

Short Review: the Santa Fe breakfast burrito with ”Luxury home fries” were excellent- the burrito was huge, more than enough to keep me fed until dinner. I would safely call this place “good eats.”

I’ve come to appreciate I-80 for its incredible ability to test your sanity through long straight runs that seem to take forever; you can see the end of the horizon most of the time, which makes everything look so much further away. Wyoming has more variety in topography and color than South Dakota. They are both amazing drives that force your imagination back to the the pioneering days. You stare out at the buttes and mesas with wide spans of desert in between.

It’s beginning to look like a long night ahead of me, so I found a place for dinner in Salt Lake City, Hires Big H. A classic drive-in from 1959, complete with carhops. Hires root beer is what this place is all about, so a hamburger and root beer float seemed to be the most fitting seeing how my day started with a timeless classic.

The sun is beginning to set as I leave Salt Lake, it’s cooler out and the rolling down the window, you are treated with a smell that must be the salt lakes. Kind of smells like the ocean, but not – can’t say I’ve smelled it before. The sky has this pinkish/red haze, which I have to imagine is the ”Godzilla” Saharan dust cloud that was making it’s way over the U.S. the last few weeks. (update: the smoke is from the ”Numbers Fire” – nearly 20,000 acres on fire, south of Carson City, NV)

The sun has set, and it’s getting dark fast, at least I am in Nevada now (day’s objective achieved). An excellent rule to drive by is, don’t drive at night. I have a couple more charging stations ahead of me, and it’s getting late. My gambling for a night stay at Angel Lake is looking to be more than I am willing to risk. If they turn me away, I will have just enough juice to get me back to the West Wendover’s charging station.

Not sure if I am willing to take the risk, I pull into West Wendover. Never heard of this place before – it’s a small Vegas, smaller than Reno. I start looking for alternative places to stay. I pull up the PlugShare app, thinking I would pull another TownPlace Suites in Wisconsin. This time it was a Quality Inn.

The place was on the humble side next to all the glitz of the casino hotels down the street. I look for the 220 plug the app said would be available. Found it, but I would have needed to park in an area clearly marked no parking, yeah, this won’t do. It’s getting close to midnight, and driving any further is out of the question. So I charge up the car at the Supercharger and start looking for a place to camp.

At this point, I am willing to gamble on 5 hours of sleep vs. the local police knocking on my window. I scout out the West Wendover Welcome Center, and it says open 24/7. I drive by to see a guy frantically pacing and punching at phantom apparitions, my guess he would not be a quiet neighbor for the evening… Moving on now…

I go a little further and notice a group of vehicles parked in a lot behind one of the casinos. Maybe they are all doing the same thing I am – safety in numbers and all. So I pull in and configure the car into camp mode – I’ve got this down pretty fast now and can get everything together in under 10 minutes.

The wind outside was blustery, and every once in a while, it sounded like my Welcome Center friend may have found himself at this makeshift caravan site. The temperature dropped significantly too, what was 92 in the afternoon was 42 at night.

Another advantage of a non-gas powered car is no carbon monoxide exhaust – so the AC/heat can run when it needs to with no fear of poisoning fumes.

My alarm clock goes off; I was still pretty beat from yesterday’s push, so I hit the snooze button for another 30 minutes. When I finally got up and looked around in the daylight, I realized that I had parked in a construction site, and the vehicles were all part of the crew and equipment. Thank goodness it was either their day off or I just got up earlier than they arrive.

Blurry eyed and rested; it’s time to complete the run to Reno!