We just left Tonopah, Nevada, population 2000. A relic of the state's silver mining boom, it has a casino and several hotels, but its most notable characteristic is that it is the capital of Nye County. And what a county. On either side of this extensive metropolis (which lacks a supermarket), the roads stretch out across a sagebrush desert for 100 miles in every direction before they actually reach a settlement with enough people to field a baseball team. School buses comprise a large percentage of the vehicles you pass on these roads. They shuttle along, collecting lonely children from isolated farms or, worse, houses which seem to have no purpose other than to serve as a backdrop for an extensive collection of rusty cars and appliances.
But it's not entirely alone. Tonopah has a small, non-commercial airport. A quick check of my laptop revealed that the entire town seems to be connected by free, overlapping wireless networks. It's the other townlets in the county that you have to wonder about.
Gas is $3.61 per gallon. Though beautiful in a lunar sort of way, the landscape here could only make a geologist excited, and the geologist would have to be pretty excitable in the first place.
(For those checking our trip progress, we drove north from Ridgecrest, CA along 395 to Bishop, and then took Route 6. This is the little known Grand Army of the Republic Highway, one of the longest roadways in the United States. It ends some 3200 miles later in Provincetown, Massachusetts at the tip of Cape Cod.)
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