All the Way to Reno... and California

I left Salt Lake City pretty early on Friday. I stopped by to see the great salt lake on the way out of the city. It has a certain natural beauty to it, but it's also a little bit barren. It seemed to stretch out forever into the desert with only the mountains to bound it.

Unfortunately, after the great salt lake, there wasn't much to see in Utah or Nevada. For the first 300 miles or so there were at least some mountains to look at, but eventually it was all just rolling hills with scrub bushes on them. The worst part was that the road was straight for periods of 30 or 40 miles at a time. Without my IPod, I'm not sure how I would have made it without going crazy.

It was 511 miles just to get to Reno and the R.E.M. song couldn't have been more appropriate. It seemed to last forever, but I got there. I kept myself occuppied racing the freight trains.

I also saw too rather curious things along the way. The first was what appeared to be a random sculpture in the desert. I managed to get a picture of it as I drove by at 75mph. If anybody can tell me exactly what it is I will pay them money. The second was a road sign that I couldn't help, but get a picture of as I drove past. Along the Utah/Nevada border there is a small town named Ola, which I couldn't help but be reminded of a certain computer science professor.

After racing down I-80 out of Reno and finally into California, I stopped by to see Lake Tahoe. It wasn't very far off the highway and to my surprise, there were still people out swimming in the lake. I guess it's a little bit warmer than the ocean this time of year. It really was impressive to see just how big it was. I guess Friday was the day of two lakes. Not many people can claim to have seen both the great salt lake and lake Tahoe both in the same day.

After seeing lake Tahoe, I had a relatively short (150 mile) drive down to Albert's house. Albert is a former Duke grad student that I worked with who is now working for NVIDIA in San Jose. I finally made it to his house around 9pm PDT. I had been driving for 13 hours and I'd gone more than 800 miles, but I made it to California! Now all I've got left is a short 19 mile hop up to Stanford. Whoohoo!