We left Green River this morning, ready for a 430 mile trip. Due to the sad, wet clay related demise of my camera yesterday, we are now only armed with the iphone, so please bear with us if our pictures are a little lacking. We'll continue to try and give you a flavour of the sights on our journey.
After sitting off along our beloved Highway 50, which has taken us 2750 miles from Washington DC, we took a detour and headed south down Highway 24, to visit some very strange creatures.
We made it to Goblin a Valley State Park. It has to be the strangest place I have ever seen.
It used to be an inland sea. The water has formed the sand and clay into the most amazing structures, known locally as Goblins due to the fact that many of them seem to represent faces.
Apparently, it was used as a location in the film Galaxy Quest. It is extremely Star Trek-like.
Most of the figures are between 10 and 15 feet high and there are seemingly thousands of them.
Having had our Goblin experience, we headed back to Highway 50 and, once again turned to head west.
The journey was stunning, taking us past amazing mesas,ranging from red and yellow to shades of green, punctuated by stunning rock formations. This is the land used in countless films, including many John Wayne films, the Lone Ranger (Johnny Depp) and it was the place where Thelma and Louise (spoiler alert) drove off the cliff. We didn't follow them.
We headed past Eagle Canyon, so called because 4 brothers who lived in the canyon used to say that the walls were so high that an eagle would not be able to escape. We didn't see any eagles today, so we can't verify that bit!
We the came to Salt Wash, which was absolutely stunning. The picture below is overlooking land on which the Mormons settled, whilst they were looking for land which was not wanted by anybody else. It was described as forsaken land, but families did settle there, and it is achingly beautiful.
From there, the landscape opened up even further and, more than anywhere else on this trip, including the southern Great Plains of Missouri and Kansas, America revealed to us it's utter vastness. It was inspiring and rehumanising to watch the landscape change from mesas to rolling hills, to massive flat glacial valleys. It was stunning.
After many miles, we arrived at the state line to enter Nevada. It coincided with the time line, to enter the pacific time zone. We couldn't resist some silly photo opportunities, despite the curious looks from the truckers parked up on the opposite side of the road.
On the picture below, half Col's body is at 5:10pm, and the other half is at 6:10pm.
After a fantastic day, we safely arrived at Ely, Nevada, in the Great Basin, which is the start of the Loneliest Highway.
We were presented with I our official survival guide. We now need to get this stamped at various locations along the route, to be presented with a certificate to say we survived the loneliest highway!
Anyway, tomorrow is an easy day for us- only 77 miles to travel to Eureka. So we're going to hand over tomorrow's blog to 2 guys who have accompanied us on every step of our adventure, so you can hear about things from their perspective. They are Larry and James and belong to my boys, Thomas and Curtis. More from them tomorrow.
See you in Eureka! :0)
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