We spent Thursday night in a hotel near San Mateo, with the intent of hitting the road first thing Friday morning. But when I woke up in the morning, I remembered that - although the movers had taken everything we wanted from our Public Storage space - there was still a bunch of junk in there we needed to clean out. I arrived at Public Storage right when they opened the gates at 7am, and packed the car full of junk. We had arranged for a big garbage pickup at the house that day, and the Salvation Army was coming too, so I figured I'd take everything to the house. But when I arrived, all the garbage had been picked up, and the Salvation Army had already come too. It figures they'd show up first thing in the morning on the one day you don't want them to!

So I was driving around with a car packed with junk, trying to figure out what to do with it. In California, businesses keep their dumpsters under lock and key, I guess because of guys like me driving around in cars filled with garbage. I headed back to the hotel, and noticed that its dumpsters had just been emptied, and they hadn't been locked up yet. So I scurrilously unloaded the contents of the car into one of them. I then wrangled up Maria and Kai, we loaded up the car, and we made our getaway.

Nowadays, route 50 starts just outside of Sacramento (the starting point is marked with the sign on your right, indicating the mileage to the end of Route 50 in Maryland). But originally it started at the foot of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. So we headed up the peninsula and took our last drive across the bay (as California residents anyway). Before getting to Sacramento, we made our first stop, at the Jelly Belly factory. We went on a tour of the factory floor, where they make the jelly beans. No picture taking was allowed in the factory, I guess to protect their secret jelly bean techniques :) But here's a picture of us next to a Jelly Belly portrait of Ronald Reagan (the silly hats were required for the tour, maybe to keep our hair out of the jelly beans?) and a picture of Kai enjoying their cafeteria.

Since we had a late start due to the morning's trash debacle, we decided to not make a stop in Sacramento, and instead pressed on to south Lake Tahoe. I'd never been to the south side of Tahoe before: the California side of route 50 is lined with t-shirt and trinket shops, and then about 6 inches over the Nevada border, you hit the big casinos and hotels. We made a wrong turn and headed a ways up the west side of the lake (I finally noticed that the lake was on the wrong side of the car), but that side of the lake is undeveloped, so the scenary was beautiful, making it a pleasant detour.

We had dinner at El Charro Avitia in Carson City, which was a halfway decent Mexican restaurant. It was recommended by our guide book - Road Trip USA. This book was our bible for this trip. It provides a ton of information for a number of different cross-country routes (both east-west and north-south). I very highly recommend it! It was useful for helping us find fun things to see, but it was the restaurant recommendations that were a real godsend. It saved us from choosing monotonous-but-reliable-Denny's-or-Applebee's vs. some-random-maybe-horrible-maybe-good local restaurant for every meal. After dinner we got a motel room and settled down for the night. Here's an almost-but-not-quite-scandalous picture of Kai in the motel room (trying on mom's sandals).