Nevada is a wide state. There are several other western states that are at least as wide, but Nevada feels exceptionally big because it's so empty and dry and hot. We spent most of our second day driving... This is a good point for me to pause in telling the tale of our journey and explain how to maintain your sanity while spending a good part of each day in a car with a two year old who's strapped in a car seat. It's a tough age for a trip like this because they're old enough to be aware of, and be affected by, all the daily changes and emotional strains, but they're not old enough to really understand everything that's happening (especially in our case, since this was part of a cross-country move). First, you can only do a trip like this with a child who has a mild temperment. If you're kid is really rambunctious and/or doesn't deal well with change, forget it. In general, you have to set aside your notions of good parenting on a car trip like this, and do the following:

• Bring a portable DVD player, and all your kid's favorite DVDs. Be prepared to watch them over and over and over again (kids are inclined to do this anyway).
• Purge yourself of any fantasies you might have of covering 500 miles per day. Don't expect to do more than five hours of driving per day.
• Try to have some kind of daily routine. We would usually hit the road after breakfast, and then make a mid-morning or lunchtime stop for a couple of hours. Kai would nap in his car seat after lunch, usually for a couple hours. We'd make a short stop after his nap, and then drive until six or so, and then we'd have dinner and get a motel.
• In general, I despise the mall-ification and corporate blandness and sameness that has swept the US, but for a two-year looking for some stability, it's a godsend. In particular, Kai loves the Thomas train play tables that are set up in the children's section of every Barnes & Noble in the country. When we couldn't find a mall, we could usually find a playground with swings and slides, so Kai could run around.

Ok, back to our story: before leaving Carson City, we stopped at the Nevada State Railroad Museum. It's a small museum, but the staff were amazingly friendly. When we went into the workshop, the old guy working there ended up giving Kai and I a ride on a hand car. Then we hit the road.

The stretch of Nevada covered by Route 50 is really beautiful - much more so than I-80, which is to the north. For most of the trip across the state, there is little to mark man's presence, other than the road itself. I think this is how Route 50 earned the nickname "the loneliest road in America."

After lunch at a dumpy Mexican place in the town of Fallon (pop. 7,000 - big for a Nevada town), we stopped at Grimes Point, which is just past a US Navy target range and a solitary brothel in the middle of nowhere. Grimes Point is just off the highway, and has a couple of self-guided trails that lead "...past hundreds of images etched into the lichen-covered, espresso-brown basalt boulders. Some 8,000 years ago, when the carvings were made, Grimes Point was on the shores of now-vanished Lake Lahontan, a prime hunting and fishing ground for prehistoric Great Basin peoples." (That quote, and all subsequent ones, are from Road Trip USA). We also wanted to stop at Sand Mountain, which is this weird giant sand dune in an area where there is no other substantial accumulations of sand. You can see it from the road - it's at the base of the foothills, so my guess is that the wind must have deposited all the loose sand in that one spot over the years. According to our book, it "..makes a deep booming sound when the cascading crystals oscillate at the proper frequenecy...". But Kai had already fallen asleep, so we just pressed on. He ended up taking a mega-nap, so we made it all the way to Ely, which brought us near the border. Just about all of its hotels are inside casinos (all of which claim to have "loose slots"). We tried the "Four Sevens", which our book recommended, but it was full. So we got a room in a place nearby - and as you can see, Kai found it comfortable.