(Photos: The only thing in Warm Springs, NV; Starting down the Extraterrestrial Highway; The Little A'le'Inn [Michael is not liking it]; Atlatl campground in the Valley of Fire, including a pic of the stroller after Nora had her way with it.)

DAY 15 West Wendover to Rachel, NV (Little Alien)
We were on the road early today. Even earlier than intended. The screen on David’s cell phone keeps going out, so he used my phone as his alarm clock for this morning. I forgot to tell him my phone was still on Central Time. So it woke him up at 4 a.m. instead of 5 a.m. He went back to sleep for awhile, but we still ended up with the tanks dumped filling up the gas tank at 5:15 a.m. Stopped at a rest area in Ely, NV (the last civilization for miles and miles) for breakfast and a nap for David.
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I actually drove for awhile. We were supposed to take “Unnamed Road” from Ely to Rachel, NV, but when we got to the road, it was dirt. And we were supposed to drive on it for 100 miles or so. So we took a different route (along numbered highways), and I drove for a bit. We stopped in Warm Springs, NV, for lunch. There was nothing there but a boarded up restaurant called the Warm Springs Bar & Grill. From there we turned onto a little state route dubbed the “Extraterrestrial Highway” for its proximity to Area 51, where the government is supposedly hiding UFOs and alien bodies. Many of the very few vehicles we passed were white pickups and white SUVs with U.S. Government plates. One, though, was a mustard yellow van with antennae all over it and an electric scooter strapped to the back. In the early afternoon we pulled into the Little A’Le’Inn (Alien), as seen in the X-Files. Well, it was quite a bit dumpier than what was shown in the X-Files, and we decided not to stay in their RV parking lot as planned. We are ahead of schedule anyway, so we had time to drive on to the next place. We did stop in the diner to eat and take photos. On the walls were photos of not-very-famous people who had visited, as well as dubious snapshots of UFOs. This was the kind of place where they serve Pepsi and beer in the can and potato chips in the bag. Just before we left, a large group of tourists from the UK came in, which classed up the joint a bit.
Nora is doing great. We are amazed by her random thoughts, though. We’ll just be going along, and all of a sudden she will say, “Toys! Grandma Grandpa’s house!” She also must really like swimming because she is still talking about the time she went swimming in Mitchell, S.D. She pointed to her clothes drawer today and said, “Nora swimsuit in there!”
We are headed for Overton, NV, which is on the north side of the Lake Mead area. We will probably stay in a state park there unless I can get cell phone reception and find out if the private RV park has a pool. It’s extremely hot and dry.
Here’s another little tidbit of life in the RV: We make up a list of meals for the week ahead, buy all the necessary groceries, and then tape the menu to the freezer door. We turn last week’s menu over and tape it next to the current one, using the back of the old one to write the next week’s grocery list or a list of things to do.
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As we headed into Overton, we realized we hadn’t marked the state park on the map on the computer. David had just put the cursor in the general area of the town where it was, and made that our endpoint. So I was calling out directions to some random place in Overton, not actually the state park. We were so sick of driving by then that when David saw the Fun & Sun RV Park (which we had called and decided against staying at) we almost pulled in. It was basically a parking lot type of setup, and nothing much to look at and no pool. Fortunately a minute or so before we passed Fun & Sun, I had located the state park in green on the map, and I thought I could see the entrance road. So we kept going, despite crying children and tired grownups and whiny dogs. We saw a sign for the park and turned in. It was one of the best decisions we have made all trip. We drove into one of the most beautiful rock formation areas I have ever seen. We were surrounded on all sides by towering orange-red rocks, eroded into fantastic shapes. It was a self-pay campground, where you put your money in an envelope and put it in a box. The architecture of the park structures was amazing. All the buildings blended seamlessly into the rock. Even the signs look cool. It’s as if the campground were designed by an artist instead of a civil engineer. The camp sites weren’t that far apart, but the way they were arranged, you couldn’t see from one into another. We had a picnic table, fire pit, grill and water spigot, but no electricity. It was so beautiful. And of course it was filled with rocks, so Nora was happy. She filled all three cups on the tray of her stroller with rocks. Then she started in on the baby seat on the bike. Our site was quite secluded, with the picnic table located almost in a cave behind a big rock formation. The rocks absorbed the heat during the day and were hot to touch. As the sun set and it cooled off, I could feel the heat coming off them just by walking past them. We took some walks and Nora watched the moon get brighter as the sun went down. (“Dark outside. See moon. Moon! Moon!) It became dark very quickly, and we were using flashlights to see (and using a few of the lights, sparingly) by the time we put Nora to bed. David and I played cards by flashlight-lantern, and we stepped out to look at the stars. It was so clear. I could hear another baby crying in a campsite down the road. Michael was really needing a lot of holding this evening, but that’s not surprising considering how much time he’s been in his carseat today. Nora is such a trooper. We sing songs when she gets grumpy going down the road, and now she can sing her ABCs almost all the way through by herself.