Day 06 - Wendover to Fallon, NV

This morning we woke to mild temperatures in the low 60's. We left our hotel at 8am and headed back east on I-80 for a few miles to the Bonneville Speedway on the western portion of the Bonneville Salt Flats.

We unhooked the trailer from the Wing and made our way out on to the Salt Flats! Much to our surprise, the surface was not very smooth. Lots of small depressions made the ride rather bumpy. Mike, HuiBok, Tom, and Julie soon joined us out on the salt flats. We stopped and took some group pictures. 

Michele jumped into the front seat of the Wing and joked that she was ready to ride. Much to her surprise, I told her to go for it. With great excitement, Michele rode around the salt flats for a few minutes fulfilling one of her "bucket list" items: to ride the Wing on the Bonneville Salt Flats.

Mike flew his drone and got several really cool aerial shots of the group of us and the bikes. We had the Flats mostly to ourselves, just one guy make a few high speed runs in his blue Mustang.

After about an hour of playing around on the salt flats, we headed back to West Wendover, NV to a car wash we scoped out ahead of time so that we could wash the salt off the bikes. Time zone change to PST so we gained an hour back.

With the bikes shined up, we headed south along US 93 (alt). The smoke today was non-existent as compared to the previous days. The further south we rode, the clearer the skies became. The views were quite spectacular with long vistas and distant mountains.

We had a brief construction delay about an hour later. The Nevada DOT guy came over and reluctantly told us previous waits for the pilot vehicle was 13 minutes. He was friendly and chatted with us about our trip, world events, the Texas floods and upcoming Florida hurricane. His crew was from Reno doing road work, tar and chipping that section of the road.

We stopped for lunch at Racks Bar and Grill in Ely (pronounced Ee-Lee) about 120 miles from Wendover, UT. Ely was the first real sign of civilization from Wendover.

After lunch, we fueled up and set out west on US-50. This portion of US-50 across Nevada is known as America's Loneliest Highway.

While it may be lonely, the scenery is beautiful and never ending. Just outside of Ely, the Wing's XM Weather app notified us of rain in the area. We basically ignored it because this is Nevada and how likely was it to rain in the desert anyway? Well, it rained on us! Four times in fact! No one shower lasted long enough to get us wet but it was enough to make the bikes a real dirty mess.
 

It was 147 miles from Ely to Austin, NV where we fueled up for the last 110 miles. In the last stretch from Austin to Fallon, we saw a forest fire in the distance and Michele saw her coyote run across the road not more than 50 yards in front of us. Wily coyote was too fast for a picture.

We arrived in Fallon at 5:30pm and, after checking into the hotel and cleaning up the bike, we went across the street to Jerry's Restaurant diner for dinner. Pie was consumed.

Today was amazing with funny stories and memories made. Tomorrow we make our way to Yosemite!