Day 7: Kirkwood to Carson City
58 miles
What a great ride this is! Carson Pass, to Hope Valley is an amazing ride, Green, verdant, panoramic, and all downhill. Once into the Carson Valley at Woolford Station the landscape completely changes. It is desert country, dry and spotted with sage and pinions.

From Woolford to Carson City, we crossed into Nevada (YEAH!!!) and followed Foothills Blvd through Genoa (great tri-tip sandwich for lunch). It was beautiful. Until we hit the suburbs of Carson City. Yuk. Strip mall city. The entire city seems to consist of strip malls laid out along the two main highways that intersect there, 395 and 50.

Somehow we managed to find the post office and pick up all of our camping gear, which we had mailed ahead to ourselves care of general delivery. After picking it up, we found a hotel, took a swim, had a nice Mexican dinner and went to sleep early so we could be on the road by 6:30 AM to beat the heat.

Day 8: Carson City to Fallon
62.5 miles
We hit the road early and by 7:00 AM were already out of strip mall hell and into the open desert heading east. Yee-haa!!!

We had a big tailwind but even with the tailwind, it wasn’t long before we were trying to figure out ways to cut out weight again. Riding with the extra 17 lbs of camping gear just was not fun. It was work and I could feel the bike straining. Plus, the campground we were planning to stay at was skanky with hardly any shade (it was 12:00 and already 98 degrees) and four miles from the nearest food.

We quickly changed plans and checked into a hotel in town, took a shower, had a great lunch and reconnoitered.

An hour later we were searching the Fallon yellow pages for some place where we could ship our gear back home. There turned out to be a place called Jeff’s Copy Service about two blocks away that was also a UPS shipping agent. By 3:30 that afternoon, all 20 lbs of our camping gear was heading home and were now traveling even lighter than before.

What a crack up, we planned for months to camp half time. For months we shopped for gear with a fish scale because weight was our foremost concern. Yet once we had it all loaded up, we decided that it just was not fun riding with that much weight and cut our losses quick.