Apparently I’m in the Pacific Time zone now, which made me feel like I woke up early. After a nice continental breakfast at the motel, I went to the gas station next door that also doubled as a Laundromat and did a load of laundry. After I checked out and filled up with gas, I got on my way. The trail actually went south out of town before turning north, presumably to hook up with the nearest dirt road and head over a hill. Since I’m feeling the time crunch a little bit, I just headed north out of town on the main road (Hwy 50, “the loneliest road in America”) until hooking back up with the trail NW of town. I went through some terrible, narrow two track trail for a while. It looked like it hadn’t been driven over in ages, and the brush was starting to consume the trail. Normally that’s not all that big of a deal, but in this area as well as several others in the past few days, there are these little bushes everywhere that look innocent enough, but are actually built like a tree. Even though they are maybe 2-3 ft high, they have branches and trunks that are several inches in diameter. This means that when driver down the trail, these little guys are both trying to poke holes in my side bags and catch them and throw me off the bike. To make matters worse, most of the actual driving surface was slippery sand. Eventually I got to a main gravel road I could fly down. After that, most of the roads were fairly quick. I made it into Battle Mountain, NV about 2pm and had Mexican for lunch. The next segment was 160 miles and I knew I wasn’t going to finish it all before dark, so I researched a lake about halfway through that had camping. After lunch, I gassed up again and set off north out of town. There was a bunch of slow, sandy stuff that almost wiped me out a few times, and also some quicker gravel roads. I made it to the lake (Chimney Dam Reservoir, http://www.ndow.org/Bodies_Of_Water/Chimney_Dam_Reservoir/) about 530pm. I think I’m just barely into the Pacific Time Zone though, because a website told me the sunsets about 7pm here. So, rather than setting out into the unknown for another hour of daylight and hoping to find a decent campsite (plus battling the setting sun beaming into my eyes like yesterday), I decided to stop a little early. I’m going to make a very light camp tonight in hopes of getting up early and getting started on the road. Tomorrow I need to finish this section, and attempt to finish the next two as well. The next section finishes in Denio, NV but apparently there is no gas there as of a few weeks ago, so I’m going to carry extra gas to avoid making a detour up to Fields, OR for gas. Hopefully that will get me to Cedarville, CA by tomorrow evening, but it’s an ambitious goal. About 70 miles to McDermitt, then 70 to Denio, then 130 to Cedarville. We’ll see.\
