It’s cold, icy, and a bit scary for people from Phoenix and just the way it is. Welcome to Highway 50, also known as the “Loneliest Road in America.”

Fortunately, we didn’t run into any more ice- or even snow-covered roads. Matter of fact, within about a half-hour, the road was dry. Eureka was the first small town we came upon and, lucky for us, the Pony Express Cafe was open and serving up breakfast burritos and hot coffee.

This was the typical view out here. Pretty lonely, huh?

I’m guessing the tree limbs have traveled out of the mountains with rains that washed them out?

With all these stops, it will take forever to drive across Nevada, but it’s okay because I love these drives out here with my best friend holding my hand.

This mailbox surprised us because search as we might, we couldn’t find a house out here that this could belong to.

Austin, Nevada, is one of the small towns along the road that would benefit from 24-hour information availability to bring our attention to the relevant facts and interesting places in town.

Edit: 17 years after our visit, while we now have smartphones, we still don’t have truly smart apps that tap an area and bring our attention to things that would be of interest. Even when looking up a place on the internet, we get a hodgepodge of disjointed information and have a terrible time trying to figure out a reasonable place to eat.

The perfect road for hitting 110 mph.

This is the “Shoe Tree” near Middlegate, Nevada. I’d imagine this thing gets pretty heavy after a good rain.

Something nice about arriving in an old town not ravaged by modernity. Welcome to Virginia City, Nevada. Mark Twain lived here when he was still Samuel Clemens. He started as a miner, but since that wasn’t successful, he ended up working for a local newspaper. His famous nom de plume “Mark Twain” made its first appearance in 1863 when he was an editor at the “Territorial Enterprise.”

One hundred thirty years ago, Virginia City had a population of about 25,000; today, it is about 1,000. Back then, the Comstock Lode was the first major deposit of silver discovered in the United States and turned Virginia City into a boomtown. Today, tourists are helping keep it alive.

Before checking into our motel in Carson City, Nevada, we drove over to Lake Tahoe for a look at this famous spot on the California-Nevada border. When we got to our motel, we were greeted with an amazing sight of thousands of tumbleweeds piled up against one side of the building and stairwell due to a recent windstorm that seemed to have delivered all the tumbleweeds from a 50-mile radius right to our doorstep.