Day 1: Woodside, CA to Elko, NV

Outline: Woodside -> Berkeley -> Reno -> Elko

Started the morning about 30 minutes later than planned - had to get all the excess junk out of the car, get gas, and set the timelapse camera up after getting gas. Headed to Berkeley for breakfast at Au Coquelet - tasty pancakes. Discovered, after breakfast, two interesting things about the timelapse so far:

• If you turn the car (and thus inverter) off without properly shutting down the camera, the camera corrupts some metadata files and reports all images on the card to be corrupt. This is a lie - they're still on the card. Solution: let the camera flush its buffer and shut it down before turning off the car. Gas stops just became a much larger hassle.
• In its initial orientation, we had a lovely time-lapse series of images...of the cloudy sky on the way to Berkeley. Solution: change where the camera's aimed, duh.

A fair amount of traffic leaving Berkeley cleared up past the 580 interchange, and everything was generally smooth heading out.

The RX-8 gets about 18-19mpg in my general driving, so the plan was to get gas around Auburn...but then Auburn came around, and we still had half a tank. New plan: Truckee. Truckee came, and there was still over a quarter tank. In the end, we made it all the way to the planned lunch stop at Reno without having to refill, for over 21mpg. Highway miles really are different.

Drive to Elko was uneventful. Traffic was moving fast - over 90mph was the norm for anyone that wasn't a big rig. Set a new record for longest travel on one tank in the 8: 288.8 mi.

Two gripes

1. It's June 12. Summer starts, technically, in under two weeks. Why, then, has there been a bank of clouds following us from the Bay Area, through the valley, over the mountains, through the desert, and into Elko? And why is it raining?
2. Road construction isn't fun to run into. It's less fun when it shuts down half the lanes in a given direction. It's even worse when it does so for 10 miles at a time...every 10 miles.

Review: Elko, NV

We haven't taken the time to really look around Elko that much, but we did go out and get dinner. Apparently, Elko has a disproportionately large Basque restaurant - such that two of the top rated restaurants on Yelp here are Basque. We had dinner at Biltoki Basque Restaurant. We both ordered the dinner special (chef's selection of three daily specials). The food was quite tasty (the soup and salad were surprisingly good)....and it just kept coming. We ended up with:

• 8 pieces of bread
• 3 bowls of soup
• 4 bowls of salad
• 4 (!) steaks
• 8 meatballs
• 1 large plate of fries
• 1 large plate of chicken
• 1 large plate of beef tongue
• 1 large plate of rice
• 1 medium plate of boiled (?) veggies
  

$18 a head is pretty typical for a nice sit-down dinner. What's not typical is when $18 a head buys you more food than a 16- and 24-year old pair of guys can eat in one sitting. We probably didn't even eat half - one of those meals easily would have sufficed for the two of us. Also, I learned that I'm not partial to the texture of braised (I think) beef tongue.

Verdict: 3.5 - 4 stars - food was tasty (except for bland vegetables), service was good. You definitely want to scale down your ordering, though.

Tomorrow: Elko to Salt Lake City to Vernal