Nevada: 2; Me: 0 (day 5)

Just in case anyone was keeping track, the official score is 2-0 in favor of Nevada. I was very excited to both drive into Mountain time zone as well as out of it in the same day today. I mean, how often do you gain 2 hours in your day when driving? Not often. But sadly the small border town of West Wendover, NV changed back to Mountain time (from Pacific) in 1999. So I did not get to fulfill that dream today. And on top of that, the hotel where we are does not have internet!! Thankfully, dad's work computer has Verizon broadband access, but it's slower than regular wireless (and thus not good for watching streaming videos of TV shows...)

Moving on from my current complaints about the state of Nevada, here is a quick run-down of our day today. We started out in Nebraska with about 175 miles to go before entering the state of Wyoming. I got really excited and managed to get this picture of one of the first signs of topography/hills that I saw! I also thought it was funny that someone put a large cut-out of a coyote on top of the hill.

Soon after that, we finally made it to Wyoming. The cowboy on the sign below is the same as the one on their license plate. As you can tell, it was foggy and misty and nasty for the first few hours of the drive this morning.


After we were past Cheyenne, the weather cleared up and the topography kept getting more interesting. There were a lot of really interesting rock formations in Wyoming, like the two below.

With such a wide open space and a now clear, beautiful day, the clouds were incredible. I know that Montana is supposedly "Big Sky Country," but Wyoming would've come in a close 2nd in that contest yesterday.

The wide open spaces also lent themselves to green energy; we passed several large windmill farms like this one.

I'm not sure if you can read the sign in the picture below, but this picture deserves a caption that says something along the lines of "Wait; what?" It says "Evanston 28 miles; Salt Lake 108 miles". Apparently there is an Evanston in Wyoming, too!

Finally, after driving for what seemed like forever, we made it to the great state of Utah! I was surprised to find that the terrain in the first part of Utah (mountainous, near Park City) was more similar to what I expected to find in the western half of Wyoming, where it was a high elevation but not very up-and-down mountainous. I thought going over the Rocky Mountains would be more like a long, extended version of going over Sewanee, but I was definitely wrong.

Utah also had some really cool rock formations.

While in Utah, my odometer hit 90K miles!! Fingers crossed that it makes it to 100K (unlike the Fiero).

Here's a picture of what we were passing when I reached 90K -- the Great Salt Desert (where part of the Great Salt Lake used to be).

Our one touristy thing so far was stopping at the Bonneville Salt Flats, which you can read about here. Sadly, we were not there on a day that they were racing. Here's a picture of dad...

And one of me... (yes, that's all salt)

After many "are we there yet"s from Dad, we finally made it over the state line, into the state of Nevada, where we stopped for the night.

Here's hoping that the drive across the rest of the state (we have a solid 400 more miles to Reno) is a better experience and that the score at least evens up.

642 miles to go...