As we drove through the beautiful rocky desert of the southwest, my sinus congestion began to clear up, and dry throat and eyes replaced it. Even so, it's hard not to appreciate the magnificent landscape. It was my first time driving through this part of the country, and I felt like I was in a cowboy movie set in the Wild West. Indeed many cowboy movies are set in this area. Despite being in the desert, there was a fair amount of vegetation and many farms. However, when we get to Black Rock desert, the home of Burning Man, there will be absolutely no indigenous life. Just us and the playa.

After we took the I-40 into New Mexico and settled outside of Gallup for the night, we took the Devil's Highway up into Colorado, so named because its highway number is 666. It was renamed to Highway 491 four years ago less for superstitious reasons and more because people would steal the signs, but much of the area still retains an aura of death. Some craggy little roads that meandered off the highway gave the feeling of death from dehydration and isolation and vultures picking at the remains, and the very long stretches of highway with no gas station, exit, or civilization of any sort reinforced that feeling. The sign that pointed the way to "Deeth - Starr" topped it all off. We were going to stop in Mesa Verde as we drove through the smaller highways of the Painted Desert in the lower corner of Colorado, but the cities were so small that we literally passed right through them before we realized that we were in a city.

In Sparks, Nevada, right outside Reno, we checked into the Silver Club Hotel-Casino. This was the land of casinos. Even the gas stations had slot machines! Sam, the experienced poker player that he is (at least compared to me), joined the poker table, and I wondered around the casino a bit. The slot machines were mostly populated with middle-aged women smoking cigarettes while the poker table was a crowd of almost all men.

On to San Francisco…

The next day we set out on the I-80 toward San Francisco. The hot, dry desert behind us, we felt the invigorating burst of cool, moist air emanating from the bay area. This will be my first time in San Francisco, and I've been looking forward to it. They say San Francisco has a much more relaxed pace compared with our starting location of New York even though both are well-populated urban areas. Just feeling the wonderful weather was enough to relax me, and I began a feel an all-encompassing contentment. Here we will spend the last few days of our preparations before we set course for the little circle of isolated community deep in the desert.