Five and a half days is the drive from the middle of the Arizona desert to the rain forests of Olympic National Park in Northwest Washington. This 4th of July celebration will be spent covering over 3,100 miles (5,000km) as we explore roads and terrain we’ve never seen and some we have. It’s Thursday afternoon at 2:00 p.m. when we embark on the first leg of the trip that will take us north into Nevada.

Our path out of Phoenix today was via Nothing to Kingman and then here to the Hoover Dam on the Arizona-Nevada border. We’ll skip Vegas because it’s not part of our travel plans. In our effort to cover about 550 miles this afternoon into the night, we’ll even forsake photos to save time.

Into the night, we continue our trek north with northern Nevada in our sights. Up the US-93, the NV-318 will deliver us at 10:30 p.m. to the hopping town of Ely out near the Great Basin National Park (which is not on our itinerary either).