Starting to Head Eastward

July  25-29, 2002

July 25 - Left Travis AFB for the last time and started to head east, i.e. towards home. Of course, we don't plan to get there for quite a while. The first stop was Placerville, an old mining town in the Sierra foothills and on the road to Lake Tahoe. My great grandfather, John Vanderbilt, lived there in the late 1850s and managed the Cary House hotel, among his other exploits.

The present Cary House. It is still a hotel. The fourth floor is a more recent addition. The lobby inside was very elegant; it looked like a neat place to stay. Maybe next trip.

Directly across from the hotel is the Hangman's Tree bar, which is the site of the old hanging tree. Placerville had the nickname of "Hangtown", which you can still see in the names of some of the local businesses.

After Placerville we headed up U.S. 50 to Lake Tahoe, approaching it from the south. Tahoe is a large and very beautiful high mountain lake (elevation of 6220 ft.) It has one outlet, the Truckee River, which drains into Nevada and eventually reaches Lake Pyramid and evaporates; Tahoe's waters never reach the ocean. Lake Tahoe is also overrun with people; we were able to camp there only one night and could not find a site for the weekend, so we moved on to Virginia City.

July 26-28 - We spent a couple of nights in Virginia City, which is an old mining town in the desert mountains about 25 miles south of Reno. Samuel Clemens started his writing career as a newspaper reporter in Virginia City. The town currently lives off tourism, exploiting its history as a "rough and tough" mining and gambling town. We spent a day touring historical sites and browsing in shops selling typical tourist junk; after a while the shops began to all look alike. The next day we headed down to Reno to do some shopping and to spend the night with my nephew, Chuck.

July 29 - Headed eastward on Interstate 80 to Salt Lake City. Most of Nevada is rather bleak desert, so the game plan was to get across it as fast as possible.  Some people like this desert, but we are not among them. As soon as you cross into Utah, you come to the Great Salt Lake Desert, which is even bleaker.

The Bonneville Salt Flats, where land speed records are made and broken. The whiteness of the salt spreading as far as you can see is something to behold.

    We arrived in Salt Lake City, and started on working on family genealogy. Nancy did some work on her German roots; we also worked on the Emmert origins in Germany in connection with our trip there in the fall.  Now I need to make good on my boast of finding the connection between my great grandfather, John Vanderbilt, and the rich Vanderbilts back east.