ET Highway Day 2

I woke up when the alarm went off and people started shuffling around.  I really did not want to get out of bed.  It was cold and I really didn’t feel like doing anything.  It was about 35 degrees outside and you could feel it leaking through the weak spots of the trailer.  I managed to muster up some energy to use the bathroom and put my clothes on.  We made jokes about aliens and being abducted.  We packed our stuff in our vehicle, left the key in the room and drove over to the restaurant.  We realized last night that there was a cache inside the Inn, why we missed it, I have no idea.  We asked one of the employees who was stocking supplies if we could sign the log.  He let us in.  We grabbed the cache, signed the log and talked to one of the cooks.  Afterwards, we went back outside and worked on the earthcache just outside the door, called Groom Mining District.  We had a hard time finding the answers for some reason but we figured it out. 

We took our necessary photos and ET Highway, here we come again!  We left Rachel at about 7:34.

I should have eaten more that morning.  It caught up to me way too fast.  I had Brenda make me a PBJ sandwich around 8:30 as I found caches along the road.  I ate the sandwich as I cached.  It hit the spot.  After a couple hundred I traded with Ray for a while.  Brenda drove and I stamped logs.  For some reason our hand held GPS shut off a couple times while we were caching.  It wouldn’t log the last two that you already logged as found so we had a couple of minor set backs, or epic fails, as we called them.  This actually messed up our final count later on but we are tedious note takers so it wasn’t a problem.

We finally found a legit radio station from our rental SUV on our Sirus radio stations, however eventually in the same day, the songs started to repeat.  We didn't mind.  It was better than talk shows, news radio, rap or Mexican.

 At 9:17 we hit our 100 for the day, which brought our total to 600 caches, we still had a ways to go.

There were still cows roaming around the countryside. 

We reached an area that at some point had a lot of standing water in it and it was very flat.  The sun had dried out the landscape and turned it in to a cracked dry cool looking photo opportunity.

As the day went on the temperature got warmer.  Remember we were gaining elevation as we drove closer and closer to Toponah, which is at 6000 feet in elevation, that’s higher than Denver, Colorado, the so-called mile high city. 

At our 644th cache, we had our first Brenda epic fail.  She ran over the cache site.

We had our first Ray epic fail at cache #661, where he pressed a DNF instead of a found log on the GPS.  We had to fix it in a hurry because you only got maybe a minute in between caches. 

At roughly 10:55 a.m., at about number 200 for the day, #700 all together, on the ET Highway, we grabbed The Original ET Cache (placed 11/29/02) before the power trail was placed back in 2011.  It was quite the adventure.  I took video of it.  It was up a rocky hill sitting on the ledge of a rock cliff.  You could see it from afar.  It was an ammo can hidden in a rock pile.  The view from the cache site was awesome.  The only body of water we saw on the entire trail series.

We stamped the logbook and Brenda unloaded a bunch of trackables inside the ammo can.  We almost couldn't close it.  We put it back, piled rocks on top of it and made our way back down to the car.

We got back into the car and headed to the next few hundred caches.  Ray and I took turns during this section and Brenda drove.  We were still doing very well with gas.  We haven't even had to touch our 5 gallon container in the back yet.

We saw cactus, lots of dry lake beds, cows, lots of benchmarks, a couple of cow watering stations and even some running water near the road.  It turned out to be a very pleasant day as far as temperature went.  It was very cold this morning and ended up being around 71 degrees.  The wind was still chilly though, when it blew.

 

Brenda had a turn getting out and grabbing caches for a while.  She had two epic DNF fails on the GPS we had to fix before going to the next few.  It was an easy fix but it was confusing at the same time.  It was more of a which number did we come from and which number are we going to, type of thing.

We saw some 375 signs as we got closer to the end of the ET Highway.  I got out and it was my turn to get a few hundred of them.  We had our first GPS epic fail when it shut off all of the sudden.  We turned it back on and it had not logged the last two we found so we had to hurry and log them so we could go to the next one.

We were getting really close to the end.  Warm Springs was the next unincorporated community.  It was never more than a tiny settlement, that in its heyday was a stop over for travelers but has become a ghost town because of its dwindling population over time.  It got its name from the pools that filled with the warm spring water that the locals prided themselves on.  It is now a run down, boarded up, blip on the side of the road.

At around noon, we hit #300 for the day which gave us a total of about 800 all together.  We reached the end of Hwy 375 at 12:43 and we stopped to get another extra cache on our route and made some quick sandwiches to eat.

We made our way across the street to ET Asteroid.  I found a way to climb up it.  Brenda made the find.

 It was still my turn to jump out of the car and grab caches.   We saw a motor home parked on the side of the road and we wondered what they were doing.  We got a clear view and noticed they were taking pictures of big horned sheep.  We stopped to get #838 and to take a picture of the sheep.

We joked around, laughed, told funny stories and some of them got out of hand, not in a bad way though.  We came up with our first quote of the day.  "This trip is rated PG."  "No it's not, it's rated PG-13 because of the swearing and nudity."  Haha.

At 1:45 near cache #863, we pulled over at the litter barrel.  We got rid of all of the garbage we've accumulated since we left the Little A'Le'Inn, we all used the bathroom (behind the barrel) and just to be sure, we dumped the 5 gallon gas container into our tank.  We were probably fine but didn't really want to risk the running out of gas in the middle of nowhere.

Remember, we were literally in the middle of nowhere, we had no cell service, not a good place for accidents or uh oh's.  We got back in the car and grabbed the next two hundred caches.  Between Ray and I, we got it done.  We saw a badger just before the caches on the highway ended.  At around 2:30, we had 400 caches and we were up to #900.

When we did run out of highway caches, the next section brought us to the dirt national forest roads (#942), which I thought was weird since there aren't any forests...

We tried to pound those out as quick as we could so we could go into Tonopah, check into our hotel and go get some real food.   This area was going to be a challenge because they do not go in any order and if you were to try and do them in numerical order you would be back tracking A LOT.  We did the ones that made sense at the time because we didn't have a good map to look off of.  We were going to have to look at the map and select which areas would be efficient with our daily goals.

We got done with our quota at around 4:00 and headed towards Tonopah.  We saw our first cop in three days close to town.  I could not believe how far 11 miles was in the middle of nowhere when you could actually see the miles ahead of you.

We got to Tonopah and came to the Hwy 6 and US 95 intersection and followed our GPS to the motel.  The town has some neat topography and geology but it felt so deserted and run down.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonopah,_Nevada

We went to our hotel first and unloaded our car.  While trying to find a parking spot, this guy in a huge truck could not figure out how to park his truck in the allowed parking spot.  It probably took him four times just to get it between the lines.

I grabbed my suit cases and back pack and took them into the hotel room and took the bed closest to the bathroom, mostly for the wall next to the bed.

When Ray checked us in, the lady at the desk suggested we go to the Mexican restaurant down the street called El Marques.   We walked.   I ordered an enchilada and they had margaritas with their food.  Brenda had one too many and was very loopy afterwards, lol.  We decided to go after a few caches along the main road.  We found three of them and then returned to our room to unwind.

We took showers, in between getting ready for tomorrow, internetting and watching reruns of CSI and House on the huge flat screen TV.  We wrote down which caches we were going to go after which was a great thing because of how crazy it was going to be trying to keep count.  Here's to the next 500!

Next Adventure:  The next 500 caches on the ET Highway.