The vast stretch of landscape between Colorado and Nevada may sometimes appear desolate and empty, but for us, it’s full of memories after 30 years of living on the road; and on this last RV outing, we bumped into these memories constantly.

Leaving Laramie, we headed on through Rawlins and then to Green River for the night, parking our RV in a vacant lot by a quarry, with a stunning view of a butte that was really a beaut, especially at dusk and dawn.

Green River

The town of Green River has a river running through it called… well, you guessed it. And this river was the scene of a very fond memory for us. Years ago when our son Zephyr was about 10, we participated in a ranger-led float down Green River, wearing a life jacket through some rapids and eddies that made for quite a fun ride. This was one of the locations where Zephyr collected a “junior ranger” badge for doing certain activities in national parks. He garnered quite a few of these badges, which he proudly displayed on a ranger-flavored vest.

While parked in Green River, we got a phone call from the daughter of our friend Dan in Massachusetts, giving us the sad news that her dad had passed away. Dan had been for several years one of our fellow “ghouls” scaring the wits out of people at a Halloween attraction. Thanks for the memories, Dan. May you be at peace in the Happy Haunting Grounds. You were one of the best.

After Green River, we stopped to dump our RV tanks at a place called Little America, which first came to our attention about 20 years ago. Driving through Wyoming on I-70, we kept seeing billboards breathlessly touting the wonders of Little America, which was getting closer and closer to us. Figuring we must be in for some kind of Prairie Disneyland, we pulled off to check it out, and discovered that Little America was in fact… a truck stop. With a rather nice-looking motel attached. But not much more. At least it did offer soft-serve ice cream cones for the outlandish price of fifteen cents, which was quite a bargain even back then. So we treated ourselves to those, as a reward for our faithful anticipation.

Somewhere in Wyoming just before the Utah border, we passed something that we certainly never expected to see: a truck pulling a BART car. BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) is the metro system in the San Francisco Bay Area, and we’ve ridden on those cars many a time. In some other state (the exact location gets lost in a blur of so many years of memories) we once saw one of those cars in a permanent roadside display. It appears that BART is not only rapid, but it really gets around.

Just across the Utah border, we came to a little wildlife preserve that featured moose and buffalo among its guests of honor. What was most interesting was that some of the buffalo were white — a first for us. We didn’t even know they were available in vanilla.

White Buffalo

Salt Lake City

On into Salt Lake City, where we got out of the stifling heat by going into the FamilySearch Library, which is the most extensive repository of genealogy records and tools in the whole country, if not the whole world. We’d both been curious about delving into our respective family trees a little more. A few years earlier, Kimberly identified her birth parents and made contact with relatives on both sides, and she wanted to find out more about those branches. Just before that, we visited Poland for the first time, where her adoptive father has roots; and she found some intriguing mysteries about that tree. Meanwhile, Dennis uncovered evidence that he may have had a Native American ancestor (actually, he may have had three of them), and was really curious about that.

So in we went, not even knowing where to begin in this vast ocean of printed records and computer databases. Fortunately, this place has plenty of knowledgeable volunteers on hand eager to assist the lost and confused gene pool divers. But as we only had a couple of hours to plug away at it, we still really didn’t get very far.

Salt Flats

Continuing through Utah, we parked for the night at the Bonneville Salt Flats. This is a 60 square mile expanse of salt crust, up to 5 feet thick. It’s a good place to turn cartwheels and do other goofy poses if one is so inclined.

One section of it, well removed from the freeway, is the Bonneville Speedway, which as the name suggests, is a place where high-speed vehicles try out their wheels and compete to set new records. One shouldn’t call them cars, because some of them are more like rockets on wheels. And they achieve the velocity of rockets, or at least jumbo jets, at times topping 600 mph.

Independence Day connection in Wendover

A few miles later, we came to Wendover, which straddles the border of Utah and Nevada. Kimberly is well-acquainted with this town, having spent a couple of weeks here working on a well-known movie nearly 30 years ago. For a period of three years (1995-97) we restricted our national touring mostly to the summer months, and the rest of the time we spent in L.A. working as movie extras. (Zephyr, who was 6 at the time, made out rather better than his parents, scoring speaking roles in a couple of high-profile commercials.) One film that Kimberly worked on was the blockbuster Independence Day — you can spot her posing as an aide to the president; After shooting for a few days in Los Angeles, she and several others were flown out to Wendover to use the desert as the location of Area 51.

We poked inside the visitors’ center in Wendover, and saw a display about the movies that have filmed there, including this one. And we were rather surprised to see that there have been so many.

And then, as we left behind the conservative Wendover, Utah and crossed the line into the wild west gambling and drinking town of Wendover, Nevada, the iconic neon cowboy pointed the way toward our destination of Reno, which is a town filled with many memories indeed.

7/19-24/2023