Highways 395 & 95 And High Weirdness

Another road trip to southern California, the kid and I set off down highway 395. It's pretty sparsely populated with a series of small towns threaded the length of the Owens valley.

One of these is Lone Pine. Lone Pine is apparently home to several wits. Their 'welcome' sign routinely 'gets damaged in the weather' (wink, wink) and ends up looking like an opening scene from a Blumhouse movie.

LOTS OF HARM. LOTS OF IT.

This time, the 'Welcome' sign was, sadly, intact.  But never fear, some wag had set up a bit of public art!

Lone Pine has a special tree, grown from a seedling sent from England in 1900. You can see it behind the sign, on the left.

OK, cool little public interest thing...

Then we see what's lurking under the tree. It scared the Hell outta the kid at first, she thought it was a real person.

 

Haha. OK, we walk past the sign for the tree to check it out...

But wait...under the sign for the tree, people have hung...things.

You know...things.

The kid spots this hanging junk and slams to a halt, her instincts perfectly in place. She's already unhappy with the fake frozen guy, and this weird shit isn't helping. "Mom...why is that stuff hanging there...?"
I don't know, I tell her.
"But...wait--is that a ROCK?!  Why did someone hang up rocks?!" Sounding decidedly freaked out. I turn, and her eyes are practically spinning around in her head.

I still don't know, but I'm thinkin' next time we go by, I'd better be ready and leave a fetish of our own. I'm sure I can come up with something... 

Meanwhile, we skirt the tree to get a closer look at frozen guy.

It was marvelously creepy and we heartily approved.  As we left, some people in a van screeched to a halt and exited their car laughing and pointing at the thing. We left them to discover the weird hanging junk display.

On the way home, weather on 395 demanded we detour up through Nevada on highway 95, which is wonderful and chock full of desert weirdness.
When you leave Bishop and fling yourself out on highway 6--the gateway to highway 95--they *warn* you.

Gas up, babies.

From there, you cross the White mountains, say a prayer to the gods of your choice and get on highway 95, traveling up through Nevada. There is *very* little out there...except mining towns and brothels.

 Hey, here in Nevada we have STANDARDS.

Sue's motel. I looove this sign...

Sadly the motel is derelict.

LIVING UNDER POWER LINES CANNOT HURT YOU OR AFFECT YOUR BRAIN.

Again, Nevada.  Weird is kinda what we *do* here.


Among other things Hawthorne has a military museum. A dog park adjacent is home to these wind sculptures made from surplus military bombs and other cool stuff.

These flowers turn in the wind and are a real eye catcher.

Some day when we have more time (and it isn't either the dead of winter or height of summer) we'll go back for a more extended trip to explore!

Reno March For Our Lives

Today we marched...again...getting tired of marching for basically the same shit we did in the 60's and 70's, trying to get people to do the right thing and be decent human beings. Which you'd think people would naturally want to do. Just when you think you've got it fixed...

I knew when Sandy Hook happened and nothing got done when a bunch of kindergarteners were murdered, that the government wasn't going to get off it's butt any time soon.

Today's march was in Reno, we made some signs, dressed warm (the kid in her white wolf costume to help draw attention to the issue at hand) and got some coffee!

We gathered outside the federal courthouse in Reno where the kid posed with my sign.

The mask is articulated so the lower jaw moves when she speaks...I just love how she wears her glasses on the outside of the mask so she's a studious-looking little wolf.

Although this little one wasn't thrilled with it and hid behind her sign.

The building and it's intimidating surrounding fence...

Pretty quickly a crowd of at least 1000 (some sources say as many as 10,000) had gathered. We were in the middle and the crowd stretched in both directions as far as we could see.

A lovely mixed group--parents, kids, veterans, grandparents, college kids, teachers...and a lot of dogs! The crowd was friendly and relaxed. Typical of our area, one guy was going for coffee and asked if anyone else wanted anything. It was so cold and windy that coffee was as important as your sign.

And yeah, that's a kid in a T-Rex costume in the background in the middle right.

The organizers had passed out some 'March For Our Lives' signs but pretty much everyone had brought their own homemade sign, too.

And we're off!  We started at the federal courthouse and marched down Virginia Street to the 'Believe' Plaza just across the Truckee river.

'I go to school to get As NOT PTSD'

Appropriately the name of the cross-street is 'Liberty St'.

And yeah, partway there it started to snow! People just groaned and laughed. Lots of people commented to the kid that she was probably the warmest one there.

Hey, I see my pink brain hat down in the corner! I made one for each of us, my version of the 'pussy hat'.

Love the signs...

Snow getting thicker...

But no one quit!

Guy with a truly GIANT gun.

And the T Rex kid with his sign, his mom was along as his handler/protector.

Finally we got to the plaza, where everyone stopped to pet the cute doggy before going in.  First things first, man.

 

The stage on the left. We couldn't get near it to hear anyone so we hung out on the outskirts. There were several tables set up where you could register to vote, and a couple of nice people circulating with petitions they were asking people to sign. Nobody was pushy or rude.

'I've Seen Smarter Cabinets At IKEA'.

The sculpture on the left is a giant mother and baby pair of stained glass whales, a very intricate and beautiful sculpture.

When your message gets lost in your too-busy sign.

I'd taken along some origami doves to hand out to random folks. Most people were charmed and accepted them readily.

But there was one guy (he and his buddy had come up to us and introduced themselves as political science students at UNR), who when I held one out to him drew back his hand like it was a snake about to bite him and asked fearfully, 'What's that mean?' 

Poor soul. I said gently, 'It's a just paper dove. It has no agenda.'

He finally relaxed, smiled and accepted it.

The kid turned out to be quite popular and a bunch of people wanted their picture taken with her. I was glad for her sake that she'd had another positive experience with exercising her rights and standing up for what she believes in.

 

Even this dog, who at first had done a marvelously incredulous double-take and started barking at her.

But all in all, as we were leaving I thought these guys who drove by had the best sign of the day.

'Fuck guns, let's dance!'

I'm with you, baby. And that's how we do it in Reno.

Let's Go For A Drive!

So today we decided to go out and find the kid some snow to play in, since yesterday's storm kinda skunked us here on the valley floor.  We tossed the sled into the car and off we went, decided today to aim for the Pine Nut range across the valley--we hadn't been out there yet and wanted to explore anyway.

Unfortunately, the storm hadn't cooperated and there was no snow to be had.

But we had a nice drive anyway and got to explore a bit, which is always fun!  Down one of the roads we found a cool old barn--around here you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a cool old barn--that was tantalizingly close to the road yet fenced off.

Just as well it's fenced off since the dry stone walls were falling apart.  I *think* this was a dairy barn with animals below and hay storage above--note the hay loft carrier arm sticking out on the left side and the lack of windows in the second story.  There is also a very small house to the left of the barn, it was so overgrown with trees I couldn't get any shots of it.

But the barn was fascinating!

 There is some kind of machinery on the left, it appears to be a large green tank. The entire lower floor almost looked house-like.

On the top of the barn is this decorative vent.

Down the road a little ways and we come upon this massive old cottonwood tree.

It honest to God looks like something out of a Tim Burton movie.

Haha...naw, it doesn't have eyes.

it's got eyes it's got eyes it's got eyes--!

I think this tree had a starring role in 'Poltergeist'.

Alongside cool old tree was a nifty, but puzzling, bridge arrangement over a creek.

There are a total of THREE bridges over the creek--the wooden one, the fixed metal one and the metal two-part drawbridge. The area was fenced and posted against trespassing so I couldn't go over to get a better look, so I can't for the life of me figure out why three bridges are needed--I could see two, if you needed to lead an animal over one bridge while you used the other--but the wierd low-mounted drawbridge is perplexing.

It's actually probably gonna kinda bug the crap outta me until I get it figured out, truth be known...
Oh well.  Back down the road...

Where we suddenly come across some cool yard art!

This guy had a gigantic steel dragon, bottle trees, old farm equipment, metal sculptures...

All kinds of cool stuff!

I liked the dragon best.

The artist was smart enough to guy-wire the thing down so he wouldn't fly away in one of our epic Nevada windstorms. I can just imagine the frantic 911 calls if that happened...

I especially liked the dragon's head.

Great, now *I* need a giant dragon for *my* yard.

Despite the snow in the background of all these pictures, we couldn't get to it in the amount of time we had, so instead we stopped off at the park around the corner from our house to visit the resident ducks and the non-flying Canadian Goose (he has a wonky wing) who lives at the pond.  For some reason the goose looked like a 'George' to me, so that's what I've decided to call him.

We hadn't thought to bring any bread so they pretty much snubbed us.

After this it was time to get home and feed the chickens before they snubbed us, too.