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Daily Didactic
It was quite a day, we refinanced our home and drove the Extraterrestrial Highway.
In spite of rising at the non-vacation hour of 7:30, we spent most of the morning and early afternoon working on squaring away the small mountain of refinancing paperwork we had FedEx'd to Yosemite. We sat in the very pleasant Stellar Brew coffee shop and signed most of the hundred or so signatures required. It turns out we had to get about a dozen documents notarized, which began a hunt for a notary public. Brian visited a local real estate office who, after realizing they weren't going to sell him anything, gave him a card for Karen the "Traveling Notary". We called and left a message for the traveling notary and also drove to a shop who advertised notary services. Ten dollars per signature for twelve pieces of paper was looking like 240 dollars. We retreated to think this through. We gassed up the bus, gave it a wash, snuck it a covert tune-up, and were talking about heading east in search of better notary pricing when Karen the traveling notary called. She offered to do the work for 100 dollars, which all of a sudden sounded like a bargain. We met her in a Mammoth coffee shop and it turns out she used to do title paperwork for a living. She made sure our papers were all in order, notarized everything, and aimed us at a place to FedEx the paperwork back to Anchorage. All said and done we were 100 dollars poorer and on the road at 2:30. Unfortunately our goal was about 7 hours east.
Leaving Mammoth, we took the lonely Benton Cutoff road to the desolate Highway 95 to Tonopah and on to the equally desolate Highway 6. We drove by strings of abandoned towns and businesses, literally boarded up motel after boarded up gas station after boarded up cafe. The only town showing a pulse was Tonopah and it looks like it has a struggle ahead. We realized G had routed us all the way up through Ely to get to our destination for the evening, Cathedral Gorge out of Panaca. Looking closer at the map it turned out the right choice was the narrower "Extraterrestrial Highway" along the southern edge of Area 51. We saw no aliens unless they were masquerading as cows, which they certainly could have been. In spite of that it was a glorious two lane through beautiful sage desert, Joshua Tree forests, and the funny little town of Rachel. We came to a rest after dark in the Cathedral Gorge Campground.
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