RV Trip- Carson City, NV, Reno and Lake Tahoe, Hawthorne, NV and Jeep trails tips and travel information

intro
Welcome to RView podcast where we talk about life, travel and real estate. Join George and Lisa Hernandez each week as they share insights and parenting tips about their life as a blended family with for teens, their crazy travel and adventures and get Lisa’s input about real estate as she juggled it all while still managing her Top Producing real estate brokerage view properties.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Hi, friends. Welcome back to RView podcast. I’m Lisa RichartHernandez.

George
And I’m George Hernandez.

Lisa RichartHernandez
And we are here we’re just coming off of our trip leg where we spent Labor Day weekend and the redwood forest area of Northern California. And we then went to Carson City, Nevada. And that is a little town. It’s the capital of Los Cabos Las Vegas, capital of Nevada. And it is right near Reno and Lake Tahoe.

George
So it’s the capital of Nevada. Yeah. I was really surprised about that. Yes, it is the capital.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Interesting Facts About Nevada Carson City is the capital. And Carson City has some casinos, we stayed at this little place called gold dust West. Is that right, George?

George
Yes.

Lisa RichartHernandez
And this was not let’s just start this by saying this was not our favorite stop of all the places that we’ve been.

George
Not at all. It was it was fun, but it as the driver. It was super tight.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah, there’s like 40 G’s bases or something like that in the RV park at the coldest West, which it is right off the highway. But I mean, we are driving a 40 foot a class. It was a pull through site.

George
And I wasn’t sure how I was getting out. That’s how tight it was.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah, I mean, you could barely even like throw we had to like unhook the jeep. Because there’s no way you could keep your tow vehicle attached because it was like way too tight and short. And then we barely could get in our door because the Jeep was so close to our slides.

George
I stood between the jeep and the an RV, and my shoulders. were touching both the jeep and our pop out. And that’s just to give you a visual of how narrow it was.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah, so there were some other bear trailers and stuff in there. But if you have a smaller coach, you know, I guess that’s fine if you’re just doing a short stopover. But we chose Carson City because Lake Tahoe was all booked. And it actually turned out to our benefit. Because when we got there, all of the campgrounds in Lake Tahoe were closed because of all the fires in California.

George
Well, not only were they closed, but they were kicking people out of the campsite. So if we would have booked the campsite, we would have been moved out. So we were told that the reason they were closing all the RV parks in the parks was because all the firefighters that were typically in Tahoe were in California fighting fires. I mean it is in California but had something broken out in Tahoe. They did not feel like they had enough firefighters to battle a fire in Tahoe. Yeah. And so there’s obviously high fire alerts. Interestingly enough, we could see the smoke rolling into Carson City, from the forest fires that were happening in California while we were there. So the guy said the day before you couldn’t even see. I don’t know maybe like I would say the highway was maybe 400 yards away. Yeah, he said he couldn’t even Yeah, he said you couldn’t even see the cars on the highway. You can see the highway. Yeah.

Lisa RichartHernandez
So the goal was casino was just you know, as a tiny casino. There weren’t any table games, of course it’s COVID. So we were challenged to kind of find stuff to do, like right around the RV Resort, but we did take a beautiful drive on the first day we got there out to Lake Tahoe. Yes. And you can drive all the way around Lake Tahoe in a day very easily. It’s a beautiful drive.

George
That whole area was absolutely beautiful. And I will say I kind of fell in love with the area.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah, I would definitely like to return to Lake Tahoe and but I don’t think I would go there in an RV. I think I would fly in there in the winter time. Because it just seemed like such a cool place to just like go ski and snowmobile and do winter sports there. The water in the lake is really cold. And it was kind of cold there. I mean, we were there and what was it September. So it was still summertime, it was right after Labor Day, and it was cold.

George
Who was telling us that the lake is always always cold? As a matter of fact, if you go several feet below the surface, the water temperature pretty much stays

Lisa RichartHernandez
damn near around 55 or six years ago? Yeah. Well, it’s because it’s so deep. It’s one of the deepest lakes. I want to say like 1500 feet deep. Yes, yeah. So it was crystal blue and gorgeous to look at. And we were there on a really windy day. So there weren’t very many boats actually out on the lake. But there was tons of marinas, and I’m sure it’d be great. Also, if you had a boat there, or if there was, there was actually some boat tours that I’d looked into. We ended up not booking because again, it was just so windy.

George
I didn’t we didn’t see any boats out there. So I mean, there

Lisa RichartHernandez
was white caps in the lake. So it was cold in I mean, very, very windy. We had even we sat outside. And what was the name of the place that we had lunch that day, George, hold on, I’ll find it. Keep talking. So he sat outside and this thing is called the heavenly little area of so it’s about 30 minute drive from Carson City. So if you know you’re looking to travel to the area, and you can’t get into Lake Tahoe, or they’re all booked. Carson City really is kind of like a little jumping off point. It’s about 30 minutes to everywhere, kind of a spot. So while there wasn’t a lot to do in our campground right there, Reno was there and Lake Tahoe was there. So we did a couple little daytrips and, and, and that was very convenient. We had our cocktails at a little Mexican place called Hacienda that it’s all No, that was f Lago. Yeah, that was halfway around the lake that wasn’t in the little heavenly place where we sat outside and the guy was playing music.

George
Oh, that was the burger place that was just saw.

Lisa RichartHernandez
It’s like a whole little ski village. And there’s like all these places to sit outside. Which is great with COVID. And there was actually some live music, which was really nice, because the music wasn’t like so loud where he couldn’t hear each other talk. But it was entertaining. And it just felt as close to normal. I guess I was we felt in a while since there isn’t any live music hardly anywhere anymore with the COVID situation and stuff. So we just had a, I was some sort of there was a bunch of different restaurants you could choose from there. The restaurant itself wasn’t like super memorable. But just the atmosphere, there was what was really cool, there was a bunch of little shops and we walked around, the ski lift was closed. You could do that. I’m supposing I’m guessing it was closed because of COVID. But you can even when it’s not winter time, take the ski lift up to just see the sights and I was hoping to do that. But

Lisa RichartHernandez
again, I’m pretty sure it was because of COVID that it was closed. And then like all of the, you know, campgrounds and parks and stuff that we wanted to stop that were closed. So there were a lot of things that were closed the place where where we a was called California burger. The one where we we sat outside.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Okay.

George
Yeah. And that. Like Lisa said, It was nice, but everybody had to sit outside and that little area was a little confusing. I guess three restaurants were sharing the outside seating area. So we weren’t quite sure

Lisa RichartHernandez
what we were getting where we were going. Yeah, but there were those tables up. No, it was it was all good.

George
I mean, it was little guy playing music. He was really good. Yeah.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah, I enjoyed it.

George
I like we’re outdoors and meeting and having a cocktail and

Lisa RichartHernandez
it was beautiful. It was beautiful. Yeah, so really happy with Lake Tahoe. I again, felt like that was a place that I felt like I would really rather go in the winter time and do their winter winter activities. And I would love to go snowmobiling and stuff there.

George
Yeah, it was definitely catered more to toward the skiing, I guess there was three resorts God within a couple miles of each other. So it’s definitely more of a winter kind of place. We did go to what was the name of the ski resort.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Squaw Valley, we drove through Squaw Valley where the Olympics were held

George
1960 Olympics.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah. Yeah. And that will actually look pretty cool. I would, I would go back and stay in Squaw Valley.

George
Yeah, that was beautiful. The resort was beautiful. I mean,

Lisa RichartHernandez
of course, it was empty because it was, you know, summer. So there wasn’t really

George
well, it’s not fun to ski without snow.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah, but nobody was there. It wasn’t like there was any. There’s nothing to see here, people but it was cool. Definitely to drive through Squaw Valley. But um, that heavenly resort. Looks pretty cool. Because it was like, you know, they had all those little restaurants and everything in a little town there. And

George
they always make those little towns look like somewhere in Switzerland. Yeah. Yeah. Those really cool, but it’s, it was kind of neat to see it. offseason and just different view of these resorts. But I will say I’ve I’ve skied before. I love skiing. I haven’t skied and forever. But, man, I was looking at some of those runs. And I was like, well, that’s one I won’t be doing right there. They just looked like it was going straight down the side of the mountain.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Um, yeah. I mean, there was you could see there were probably black diamonds, but I don’t know. I don’t. Every ski resort has from beginner to advanced. Yeah, no,

George
absolutely. I’m just saying about those couple of runs that we saw that look like they were just killing it. I mean, yeah. No, no angle to it, except 90 degrees straight down is what it looked like to me.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah. Yeah. And then I think we stopped by Emerald Bay.

George
Yeah, that was beautiful.

Lisa RichartHernandez
And it was just, I guess it’s one of the most photographed places of Lake Tahoe. And you can just see this, like, gorgeous view of the water and the water is crystal blue. Again, the actual park itself was closed in. People were actually like, just climbing over the little, like, blockade things. And just like, whatever, I’m going to take my victory. Yeah.

George
So they had little viewing areas that you could normally park in, and they had them all barricaded off and people just parked across the street. And they’re like, Hey, I’m here. I’m getting my picture. So when in Rome, we did the same thing. And it was absolutely beautiful. And the water was emerald green. The rest of the Lake Tahoe was like blue as blue can be. It was just unbelievable.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah. I mean, I think they start spring ski. I mean, they have spring skiing, like in March. I think that would be like a really cool time to go where it’s like a little bit warmer and things are starting to.

George
Yeah, I believe I remember reading something about their ski season and it’s rather long.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah, it’s

George
like I think I just read. We’re kind of used the east coast where it’s December

Lisa RichartHernandez
to April, quick. December to April is their ski

George
season. Oh, okay.

Lisa RichartHernandez
And four months.

George
That’s pretty good. Yeah. Yeah.

Lisa RichartHernandez
So I mean, there’s hiking and things that you can do also at the at the park. The Rubicon trail is there. We all of these things we

George
didn’t go to we were there for just too short of a period.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah, it was a short time. And like I said, Every Park was closed.

George
Yeah. One of the other cool things about Lake Tahoe that I kind of liked was that as you drive around the lake, you come across different little towns that are around the lake. And they were all beautiful and they all had little restaurants and places to eat. And I could see enjoying that and going around and just visiting all these little towns.

Lisa RichartHernandez
I did look up some real estate while we were there. Just see if we could afford anything think a two bedroom condo is about 700,000 stuff on the lake starts around nine to a million several million 10 million I think was the new construction one.

George
Yeah, well, wasn’t that brand new one like 18 million something Yeah, it

Lisa RichartHernandez
was like crazy gorgeous.

George
We only bought it but yeah, we’re like all day just bought the RV.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Right, right. We wish so that was good. So if you’re if you stay in Carson City, you can go do a day trip to Reno, our I’m sorry to Lake Tahoe very easily. If you’re lucky enough to stay in Lake Tahoe when the campgrounds are open. I think it would also be really nice.

George
Yes and all the campgrounds look Very nice, beautiful in the woods. And still very close to town. So I wish we could report more on that. But they were all closed. Yeah. And then.

Lisa RichartHernandez
So the second day, we did a trip to Reno. And I think that was a big, I think George was more disappointed by Reno than me.

George
Because of COVID. Like, again, everything weirdly was closed. And Reno is like a mini Las Vegas. And George loves to gamble. So I love Las Vegas. So I’ve always wanted to go to Reno because I heard Oh, it’s a little Vegas little Vegas little vague. And it is and I can see it. And maybe I shouldn’t judge it because it was partially closed because everything would mostly closed. Yeah, but it just I I don’t know. I’m sorry. But I just saw zero reason to return.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah, I feel the same way. Like, I really don’t feel like we need to go back to Reno. I mean, we want to go to casinos, we would definitely go to Vegas. But I mean, everyone was friendly there or whatever. It literally looks like a ghost town. I mean, it looked like here’s all these because you know that there was nobody even the parking lots. And don’t don’t forget we were there in the middle of week two. I was like what Yeah,

George
and again, don’t don’t judge us based on what we saw, because we’re trying to be positive because of COVID and give everybody the benefit of the doubt. But every casino we went into and we went to pretty much all of them that were on the strip. And I’ll I’ll say something about that in a second. We went to all the older casinos on the strip, maybe we should have gone to the newer casinos. But the older ones nice and big looked great outside you go inside and there was one blackjack table, one roulette table. And one craps table. No, I

Lisa RichartHernandez
think there just wasn’t anything open. I think there will be more during COVID I mean, not COVID.

George
Okay, again, so maybe we need to go back once COVID is over. But I really like that. Yeah, I rather go to Vegas. Right? True.

Lisa RichartHernandez
True that. So there were a lot of things to do in the Reno area that we really just didn’t. We didn’t really explore that much. I mean, we had done some research about the things that there are to do. Like, for example, Reno is home to the world’s tallest climbing wall. And it’s the sunniest place in America. It’s among the 10 sunniest cities in the country

George
when there aren’t fires in California.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah, here’s one thing we didn’t go see, which may be interesting. And Ilan Musk is using the sun to construct the biggest building on Earth. 20 miles east of Reno at the Tesla Giga factory. We haven’t even we should have driven by that.

George
Damn, we missed that.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yes, we missed that.

George
Biggest ball of yarn we missed.

Lisa RichartHernandez
We really missed. There’s several little things that we did miss

Lisa RichartHernandez
Lake Tahoe, I’ve got all the I’ve got all these interesting facts. Like Lake Tahoe is so big that if you were to skim one inch off its entire surface, you’d end up with 3.3 3 billion gallons of water in your hands enough to fill up 5000 Olympic sized pools. It’s so deep you could stand the Empire State Building in it and not say it’s top.

George
Wow. Thank you Cliff killer even.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah, I don’t even know who that is Clifford Cheers. Oh, jeez. They say that taco tap tastes better than any other water in the country. I mean, these are all reasons that we chose the place to visit. There was the Basque cuisine. I don’t even know what that is. They have that there. We did not not get one of the top grilled cheese stops in the country is in Reno. Now you told me Yep, once a food truck and now a brick and mortar Cafe by the University of Nevada gore mount is known for its wicked menu girl Jesus.

George
All right. Well, we’re gonna have to give it a second chance. Yeah,

Lisa RichartHernandez
I mean, so you know you don’t want to be

George
totally messing everything up.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah. I mean, they have the biggest rig. rib cookoff in the country

George
at the nugget Casino Resort I’m sure that was cancelled because of COVID. There’s a lot to do in Reno, there’s also a lot of Jeep trails, we didn’t get a chance to really go on a lot of them. But there, we’ve got an app that shows you all the Jeep trails in the area, and I fired it up. There were quite a bit, so maybe we’ll give it a second shot next time we come out that way. If we’re passing through there, maybe we need to just stay at a different place. Yeah, definitely not Carson City. Sorry, Carson City. Yeah. Yeah.

Lisa RichartHernandez
I mean, don’t get me wrong. Once again, people super nice. We had one positive thing. We went to the Fandango Casino in Carson City, which was a ways from where we stayed camping. But that was the first time we got to play table games while we were there. Yep.

George
It was five miles from where we were staying. And it was a little bigger casino. So we wanted to give that a try. And

Lisa RichartHernandez
I’ll Fandango,

George
Fandango. We actually did pretty well. We walked out winning a little bit of money.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Very low. Not enough to cover dinner at the steak house.

George
So the steak house was fantastic.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah. I mean, it was actually a surprise

George
to me. Dukes Steakhouse. Yes. Are the Fandango Casino in Carson City, Nevada.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah, we, when we were playing our table games, I asked the one of the dealers I was like, yeah, how’s that Steakhouse? He’s like, sorry, no, no, it’s like expensive or whatever. Like, huh.

George
He really didn’t sell it.

Lisa RichartHernandez
No, no. So I was like, Oh, God, do we really want to chance it but then we didn’t want to go eat at the like little cafe or whatever they had there. So we’re like that was give it a shot. But I

George
I can’t pass up a steak. So I said, Come on. Let’s just go try it. It looks really nice. We looked at the menu. The menu looked really, really good. So we went inside and tried it out. And our server Victor was incredible. He was

Lisa RichartHernandez
he was a butler to who? john wayne. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

George
He was just such a neat guy, john wayne and somebody else I can’t remember. Sorry, Victor. I can’t remember who the second person. Well, yeah, we

Lisa RichartHernandez
took a picture with our server.

George
He was quite the character. 72 years old. Yeah. But he he. Yeah, he looked way younger than that. And he just he really represented the restaurant. He was fantastic waiter and took great care of us. Yeah,

Lisa RichartHernandez
he stuffed blue cheese olives for me, which I know that to me alone.

George
Yeah. I hate when some, you know, obviously, you gotta have a, if you have a restaurant, you got to have blue cheese. And you got to have all of somewhere. So I know. So many times, we’ve gotten the restaurant and people are like, yeah, sorry, we don’t have those have I eat and so back there was like,

Lisa RichartHernandez
I can have smiles for you.

George
I’ll stuff some olives for you. I got you. Don’t worry about it. Whatever you want.

Lisa RichartHernandez
My favorite cocktail, especially at a steak house. is a dirty Grey Goose vodka martini up with blue cheese olives, just slightly dirty. And while shaking and cold. Like that’s like my favorite way to start a meal at a steakhouse. And he did a fabulous job making my cocktail.

George
Yeah, my Lemon Drop Martini. Oh, that was really good. That was awesome.

Lisa RichartHernandez
And then we had some soup. Oh, the lobster bisque. Remember?

George
Oh my god.

Lisa RichartHernandez
It was like the best lobster we ever had. And we live in like, Charles. Yeah,

George
we live in a low country on the east coast. Actually, we don’t really have lobsters in Charleston. No, but I’ve had lobster bisque in New England where you would think it would be the best lobby epitome of lobster bisque. And that was absolutely the best. I repeat the best lobster bisque I’ve ever had.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah, it had like big j hat. cernit

George
huge honks chunks of lobster. Not just like a little Oh, yeah, there’s a little I think that’s lobster. No, this was definitely This is a big chunk of lobster right here.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah. And it was just like super sweet and really tasty. And it was delicious.

George
It was one of those meals that I always say kit kidding around to the waiters. I’m like, if I could lick the bowl and not be embarrassed. I would do it. Yeah, this was one of them. I mean, I literally considered licking the ball in the restaurant

Lisa RichartHernandez
it worth it just to go there for just the lobster pass.

George
Yeah, that’s like our other restaurant in Vegas, which we’ll get to in a minute. But so we started with the lobster bisque and our cocktails. And we knew we were onto something because this was really really good. And then I had the wit that I have the Philemon Yon,

Lisa RichartHernandez
I think we both had the full thing,

George
which was cooked perfectly. It was super tender. The Yeah, the beef was super high quality beef.

Lisa RichartHernandez
It was it was delicious. You know, we had really low expectations too, because the guy was

George
like, yeah, the dealer that not sell it at all. I mean, he made it sound like it was just some other Australian Steakhouse chain restaurant type of meal. And we were. So we went in just just to get a meal and really likely set really low expectations and walked out of there. Very, very happy.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah. And overall, I mean, generally speaking, I mean, it was expensive, because it’s a steak house. But in comparison to other steak houses that we’ve met, it was

George
I think it was very reasonable. Yeah, I

Lisa RichartHernandez
think it was under $100. But yeah,

George
considering what we ate and drank. So when we’d left the restaurant, we just happen to see that same dealer having a cocktail, he was off work, and he was sitting at the bar having a cocktail. So Lisa, and I walked over to him, and we actually gave him our dessert because we couldn’t eat it. It was, what was it? Two little chocolate meant something or another.

Lisa RichartHernandez
I can’t even remember, but it was really good.

George
That was really good. And we walked over and we said, Hey, man. Next time somebody asks you about the steak house, here’s our input on it, so that you can relay it. That was fantastic. So tell if anybody asked who how the restaurant is tell him. It’s great. It’s the food is fantastic. The service is great. And so we gave him our dessert. I said, Here, try this. And then you can have a real? Yeah,

Lisa RichartHernandez
well, okay, so we’re foodies. Let’s, I mean, we’re admittedly, and we are not afraid to spend money at restaurants to eat. So I’ve learned over the course of this trip, you know, take it with a grain of salt. When you ask someone Someone asked, you know, you ask the guy that’s like, you know, you’re like, guide on a, you know, tour that makes maybe $10 an hour or something about a steakhouse. They’re not gonna be like, Oh, yeah, we go there every night. You know, they

George
I don’t even think that matters. Because we have friends who have plenty of money. And they’re not foodies. So if we ask them about the steak house, they’d be like, I don’t know, it’s okay. I’d rather have a hot dog. You know what I mean? I guess. So it’s, you got to take everything with a grain of salt. And it again, it’s like what we do with with reviews. You know, sometimes you read a review, and you’re like, Oh, yeah, later

Lisa RichartHernandez
see Google reviews and stuff like that

George
in mind. We’re complaining because there was a light bulb out, or

Lisa RichartHernandez
the restaurant was just too expensive. It’s like, oh, why did you go in and you saw the menu before you walked in and knew what the prices were? Right?

George
It had $5 signs on the, you know, Yelp app.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah. So basically, whenever you listen to our podcast, when we talk about food, it’s generally going to be like, you know, look at the menu prices before you make your own decision. If you’re not a foodie, and you do care about how much you spend on food, you definitely want to take a peek at the prices before you move forward.

George
Absolutely.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah. So I mean, that’s really all there is a report about Carson City and Lake Tahoe and Reno, it was early, just kind of a couple days stopped over there. And because of the forest fires that were in California, we were supposed to go to Sequoia National Park next. And

George
they shut it down. They closed it.

Lisa RichartHernandez
It was on fire. I mean, there was literally a story that came out on social media was where I read it, but there was 200 people trapped in the forest, about about 50 miles north of where we were supposed to be staying at the kyoei when I call the lady, she said we’re in a valley we don’t have the fires right here. But she said everywhere around us is on fire. And I had it was kind of hard to get the information like traveling to find out what roads were closed and stuff in California. So we ended up having to just reroute which so you know, the Sierra mountains are all right there. And we really wanted to see the giant sequoias which now I guess are apparently burnt. Which I guess we missed our opportunity for that but um, so we rerouted over to the east side of the series and we stopped in this so we added two days to our trip in Las Vegas, which made it for six days there and then we stopped for two days. It In this little town called Hawthorne, Nevada, it’s a stopping point between Carson City and Las Vegas in the middle of pretty much nowhere.

George
So when people say nowhere, they’re talking about Hawthorne, Nevada.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yes.

George
I think we saw the sign that said, You are nowhere. So interesting fact. Hawthorne, Nevada is there’s a military base there, which stores munitions. It is the largest munitions storage facility in the United States, I believe. So as far as you could see, in this desert, there were bunkers, bunkers, everywhere. And I guess that’s where they store them until they’re needed.

Lisa RichartHernandez
So while I was in Carson City, I picked up all of the little brochures that you know, they have at the hotels and at the casinos and stuff like that, with places to go see, and I got one of the brochures I got was like, all the places to go ATV and off roading in Nevada, and this is where it’s at visit Hawthorne. And I was like, Well, look, Georgia, we could go here, spend the day and go jeeping around the area, like, you know, like, it looks like a bunch of trails there. Which so it really ended up kind of being like the really pleasant surprise.

George
It was a hidden gem.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yes. We stayed at a place called whiskey flats RV park, and it’s right on highway 95. in Hawthorne, which was about what three hours from Reno. Three hours? I

George
think so it wasn’t that far. It was perfectly between Reno and Vegas.

Lisa RichartHernandez
It was like four or five more hours to Vegas.

George
But you know, considering when we did the drive, there was nothing else in between. Yeah. That was a great place. Yes. And whiskey flats. Super nice to them. Yeah, really, really nice place. I think it’s it’s a fairly new,

Lisa RichartHernandez
I don’t know they have about 60 sites, really level nice pull through sites, large sites, very well maintained. was just actually really, really nice. And they had decent Wi Fi and phone service and it’s just outside of town. Okay, so here I’ve got it right on this sheet. It says the mileage chart to Reno it’s 132 miles from Reno. 311 miles from Las Vegas. 124 miles from Virginia City. 80 miles to mammoth and 65 miles east somebody

George
and zero miles to nowhere as dirt because it is no. But besides that, just kidding it we actually thoroughly enjoyed it. It was one of our was one of my favorite stops there. I would rather go back to Hawthorne than Carson’s city. Yeah, absolutely. I agree. My hates slamming Carson City. Like, it just it really didn’t do it for me.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah. So, um, when we got there, I, you know, went into the office, and I was like, Hey, you know, do you have any maps of any of the trails around here or anything like that. And there were several books that they sold there. I think there were. The book itself was about $25. I picked up Nevada trails, western region, back roads and four wheel drive trails. And there were like three different versions of this Western muslin West. Maybe there was for North South East West. I’m not sure. But I told her that we wanted to go to the ghost town. And she said, Oh, okay, this is the one you need the Nevada trails, western region. And so I picked that one up, but it also had the map for Reno, Carson City, Virginia City, Lake Tahoe, ton of path and Hawthorne, were all in the same book. I’m guessing you can get it on Amazon called Nevada trails, and western region. And it says for wd books.com. So like four wheel drive books.com are useful there. If you can get that book before you go and plan your trip. You’d be so much better off.

George
Yes, yeah. We took some trails that

Lisa RichartHernandez
I got a little sketched out.

George
Yeah, it was pretty sketchy. They were way out there. For us at that point, it was a little more extreme than we had ever been used to. So if the book kind of calmed our nerves, because we knew where we were going at least.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah, so I also downloaded a couple of apps. And those were also very helpful, and I downloaded the maps to go with them. And you have to do this when you have Wi Fi. So you want to do this before you set out for the day. I think that, like we never we went to the sand, sand flats one day when we were in Oregon. But we had not really gone on these like long Jeep trails, and gonji being like we did for this, this particular stop. And so it was our first real experience and kind of a learning thing. we’d learned early on in the trip that we need to pack water and pack snacks. But we you really, really, really need to make sure you have at least five bottles of water per person. I mean, depending on how long you’re going to be out there, but more water than you could possibly think you could drink. And definitely some food or snacks because sometimes it would take longer, or you see a scenic route and you go a different way. And you want to be able to be spontaneous, but you also don’t want to be lost and stuck and starving and thirsting to death.

George
Waters, the biggest thing when you think you’ve packed enough water, throw some more water in there.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Well yeah, because you’re in the desert also. So I downloaded two apps, one was called Avenza maps, A V E N Z A, and it was a free app, and you can download a bunch of the maps for free. And so the Nevada Department of Transportation has like all these maps with the roads on them. And then you download them and they run off your GPS without having any cell phone service. And they proved to be somewhat of a lifesaver for us since the book got a little bit confusing at times.

George
Because there were so many drills, we would kind of like, oh, wait a minute, are we still here? Or where are we and so I really was thankful that I had downloaded that map. And with the book, you could be on one trail, and if it’s like a really long trail, it’s one of those books that all sudden you run off the page, and it says, Okay, go to page 45. And you got to find page 45 and see where the rest of the trail is. And that’s where it can get a little a little sketchy. It’s doable, obviously. But it’s so much easier with an app. The other app we had was on X on x off road, which I have now purchased. And it’s very helpful, but it’s the same thing. It works great when you’re at the campsite, everything’s fantastic. But the key to it is to download the maps. So as soon as we got there, I downloaded a 10 mile radius map of where we were. Because when you get out and trail and all sudden you lose Wi Fi and you lose everything. Yeah, there’s like no phone service, nothing. So all you go by is the map you downloaded, right? Sort of downloaded it, it’ll work off of your GPS, and you’ll be fine. But if you don’t download it, then you’ve got this blurry ski screen that just does not work.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah, so a lot of learning lessons there. So I said, Alright, well, we want to set out and go see these ghost towns. I think the coolest thing was this adventure to go find these, like old bowtie ghost town. Yeah, we found these like abandoned mines and ghost towns and the book has, what’s cool is the book has like all of your GPS coordinates. And one thing I also wish that we have is a like a, like a GPS system that you can easily put in the GPS coordinates. Because these maps run a lot off of that. So if you’re more experienced cheaper, you may already have that type of equipment. But it might be something to look into if you’re just getting started. And I know that I’ve been doing research on it, just to get a little bit more. Because you can really track yourself with the GPS and find your way around to things much, much easier.

George
Yes. One of the things that we noticed from all the other people that were far more advanced than us and the Jeep trail riding and everything. Everybody has these large display. They’re basically iPads. So they’ve got giant displays of the maps, and everything’s downloaded and everything’s good to go. And everything is right there right in front of the driver or the copilot. And we were kind of trying to do it off of our phones. And it worked. We’re alive. We’re talking to you. But that little screen just it sucks.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah, we were definitely like rookie rookies this time. And the first the first day we fortunately made it to the bus. He goes down. I would say we, we drove up a mountain. It was about 10,000 feet elevation. And we came down that mountain on the mountain ledge. Beautiful view, amazing view. But also very scary because it was like our first time g being we were like, on something that was not like pretty much a dirt road, I would say or like the sand dunes. So there was some loose gravel. It was probably like a level one or two type of a trail pretty easy, but also new to us. And so going down that 10,000 square foot decline was a little bit a little bit nerve wracking, but it was also like some of the most beautiful views we’ve ever, ever seen. Okay, so

George
Lisa didn’t tell everybody that I’m not the biggest fan of heights at all. I’m actually very scared of heights. And she made it sound like such a wonderful trip. So let me describe it for you. It’s a road that’s dirt road, basically, just a little bit wider than my wheelbase on the Jeep. So as we’re driving along this road, if I look to my left, I’m looking basically, what was it? 8000 feet straight down.

Lisa RichartHernandez
It was not that. Okay, we’re on top of the way up there on top of the 10,000. Like t 1000 feet. Oh, yeah.

George
Oh, easy day. I can pop that out.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Probably way more stressed out. Well, I was like, Oh my God, look at this. Take pictures. That’s awesome.

George
Yeah. All she kept saying was oh my god, you should see how far down it is. Oh my god, we’re so high up. Oh, my God, this is so cool. And I was like,

Unknown Speaker
oh,

George
how about we wait, hold the commentary till till we see like I make a lot of back of my knuckles. Yeah. So another thing we found out is that there is some Jeep advocate trail etiquette. So if you’re going up a hill, you have the right of way, as opposed to the guy going down the hill. And I only say that because that road that we were on that was just wide enough for my jeep was a two way road. I don’t know what I would have done it. If a Jeep was coming up. I truly have no clue what I would have done. The right thing is to go back to your last turn and let them go through. But the thought of backing up on that trail is just we we ended up doing it. Oh, yes, yes. Now Now, I’m a professional now. All the experience in the world. But at that point, I would have been in trouble.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah. Yeah. So we continued it took us about four hours that day. And we went through this beautiful, like literal Valley in the mountains, which also we were a little little nervous about. And again now looking back on it. It was probably only like maybe what would you say like a level two or three at the very most at the most of the trails? So the boulders I guess are like, less than a foot high. Yeah. But it looked like I mean, it looked like a riverbed. We were driving down in our jeep. And, you know, when you’re used to driving on an road or gravel road or whatever you’re like, Holy smokes, how are we going to make it through this? And the Jeep just I mean, a stock Jeep could easily easily have made it to Bodie

George
right, so this was our first true off road experience with our jeep that’s new to us also. So we really had no concept of what the Jeep can do. I’ve seen a million videos, but that’s somebody else’s Jeep. I don’t know what they’ve done to it that mine is just mine is a little jacked up. It’s got a lot of modifications. That’s how it comes.

Lisa RichartHernandez
It’s a

George
it’s a Jeep Wrangler Unlimited Call of Duty limited edition Jeep, so it’s it’s got a lift kid. It’s got big tires, I got 37 inch tires. So I knew I could do more than a regular stock Jeep, but I never done anything with it. So I didn’t know what it was capable of. We didn’t even air down the tires like we were supposed to then we didn’t even know about. I knew about airing down the tires, but I didn’t I didn’t even want to mess with it because I didn’t know how much their air down and then how do I air back up without the RV so a lot of unanswered questions for me that I didn’t want to mess with.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Okay, so now that we have the answers to the questions, let us share them with you. So you don’t have to wait until three podcasts away till we tell you about how we learned about that. But so We basically with those tires, we’re down to 16. Right?

George
We air down to 18 pounds. Normally they hold 50. And the the theory behind that is it gives you more of a surface for gripping. And it makes the ride way more comfortable, which it does.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah, so the airing down means letting the air out of your tires basically. And we have an air compressor in the RV. So when we get back to the coach, then you just are, you know, put the air back in. There’s also like, really like one little thing to take the air out like one little end to take it from 50 to 20 is it takes forever. We later purchased a tool that airs all forum down at the same time. You go around and you just check the tire pressure. So that saves you about four times as you know it’s a fraction of the time.

George
Oh, yeah. But it was well worth airing them.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah, so that’s,

George
that’s for another pro tip.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Pro Tip air down your tires. So we get to Bodie. So we’re going through these valleys and I mean, there was some challenging things that would get out and take pictures of them ahead of time and incredibly beautiful and not another soul out there. And we finally come upon this ghost town. And Bodie ghost town is also now a State Historic Park. So although it’s it’s not close to anywhere, and that’s probably the reason that it is a ghost town. So only about 5% of the buildings are still there. But the town was in function from 1877 to 1881 that was its heyday and there was almost 6000 people their aesthetic actually got up to as many as 10,000 which is a big town for the 18 hundred’s. So everybody was following the 1849 Gold Rush and the mining declined along the western slope of the Sierra Nevadas and prospectors were you know hungry for the next big strike. So they cross over the Sierra Nevadas to prospect to the eastern slopes and so in that area there’s all these like abandoned mines and there’s like, like you’ll just be driving and then also you’ll like be like an old 100 year old abandoned shack like somebody must live there. And that was you know searching for gold and

George
that a lot along the trails. There was also a lot of mine shafts that were closed up so you I mean, it was a trouble but it was cool to see Wow, okay, they dug here and they dug here and then we came across one mountain there was like, there must have been six or seven different shops going into the mountain for Yeah, looking for gold.

Lisa RichartHernandez
So I was reading here that Bodie from pigs whoops. Pig gipsy, New York discovered gold in 1859 in Bodi, and he died months later in a blizzard never seen the town that honors him. body’s bones were rediscovered in 1879. And then quote misplaced after burial. His final resting place is now thought to be somewhere and on the hill. Above the cemetery. The town’s name came to be spelled Bo D bo di E and his last name was just spelled Bo DUI.

George
Did you say Poughkeepsie New York?

Lisa RichartHernandez
Pretty sure. That’s how you spell it. That’s like POGH K,

George
Poughkeepsie, New York, New York. That’s like couple miles from where I grew up. Yeah, well, that’s where that’s where this goes. I mean, hundreds but

Lisa RichartHernandez
not so during 1877 and 18. Through 1881 boaties mining district included 30 different mines, and nine stamp Mills. Along with the miners and merchants bowtie attracted a rougher element who gave the town a reputation for bad man and wild times. There were more than 60 saloons many near Bonanza Street, prostitutes cribs and opium dens in Chinatown. The boom years are over quickly and unsuccessful minds began closing and the population dropped quickly and continue to dwindle until the 1900s. But mining continued till 1942

George
Oh, no. They did a great job preserving a lot of the buildings. The school is somewhat intact. You could still see the kids desks

Lisa RichartHernandez
and the school bell and it’s crazy because those were actually like fairly new compared to that. It says it when you visit Bodie today experienced places from the towns of different time periods. You’ll see houses that were built in the 1870s. The standard mill from the late 1890s gas pumps from the 1920s that’s where we thought

George
we had the victory of year. They had an old truck parked in front of

Lisa RichartHernandez
the schoolhouse that was used until 1942. So some buildings are named According to pass the functions, others for people who live there and there was it was really cool. I mean, it looks like a movie set.

George
Yeah, that’s what we kept saying that it looked like a movie set. It almost looked fake. But it was really interesting to walk around. And so they’ve got these little numbered squares in front of each building. And

Lisa RichartHernandez
it’s like a self guided tour,

George
a walking tour.

Lisa RichartHernandez
I was like, What was it like $5 or something?

George
Yeah, put a $5 donation in you grab the book, and you just read about all these different houses and the plaques. What I thought was interesting is that the actual park rangers live in the ghost town. They were I guess they fixed up some of the old houses and that’s where they live.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah, so I thought this was also interesting. It says Bodhi State Historic Park is best best visited during the summer at other times, the weather’s unpredictable. offseason, visitors are cautioned to contact the park for road weather conditions before taking into trip. Roads are often difficult and trailers are not advised. So we drove a long way down that dirt road to get there. But I’m going to get home from there basically. Over snow equipment, snowmobiles, skis, snowshoes, etc. Maybe you required to reach the park during the winter months.

George
Yeah, I can see that the the road to get to the park, even the main road is paved up to a certain point. And it was probably a good three miles of unpaved, rough road. Any car can get over it. You don’t need a four wheel drive. You don’t need anything special. But it was really rough.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah, yeah. So it was so by the time we drove all the way there, got to the Bodhi goes town, which was our end and thing to see, which was really cool. We walked around there was starting to get to be later in the afternoon. And we were about 55 miles away from Hawthorne. So it took us almost an hour or so to drive home from their, again, a beautiful view, great drive. But if you’re going to plan that, make sure you plan for a whole day being on the road.

George
Yeah, and the whole ride back. We saw with the apps that we had, we could see all these trails that basically just bypassed the the main road. So we kept getting off and going on different dirt roads. And yeah, that was really cool, too. Because there’s a lake there. There’s, there’s different things to see different types of trails also. So we took as many as we could, yeah, fun.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah, it was really, really fun. And then there were easy trails. And if you have a Jeep or ATVs, I highly recommend that area. So I think that’s really like I think our trip to Hawthorne was always more of the highlight than Carson City. And unexpected really exciting surprise. Next stop is going to be Las Vegas will tell you all about that and how it was during COVID. So tune in to our next podcast for that. I’ll put the links to all the places that we talked about today in our show notes. And anything last notes on that, George,

George
no, I agree with you. I think Hawthorne was a hidden gem. on our trip, we were not expecting it we we really just booked it and we thought okay, this will be a nice downtime. And we actually never stopped when we were in Hawthorne. And again, the campsite, whiskey flats. kudos to them. Very nice, very clean, very spacious. And right in the middle of everything.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah, I wouldn’t hesitate. The only real Oh my God, we didn’t even talk about the second day in Hawthorne. We have to give a little shout out for that. So we drove south on was at 95 to Mina remember?

George
Yeah, we went to Mina! M I N A

Lisa RichartHernandez
And we went to the best restaurant in town.

George
Yes, it was.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Only restaurants

George
So Mina mean on Spanish is mine.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah. So I thought that was so cool. That was the name of the place. Did you write it down?

George
I forgot. I don’t know. You can’t miss it. It’s the only restaurant in town.

Lisa RichartHernandez
So there’s so in Hawthorne there is a McDonald’s. And that’s like the only basic there’s a couple other little restaurants we didn’t go to them or anything but if you drive an extra 30 miles don’t stop at the McDonald’s in Hawthorne. Go to this little roadside burger place and get a burger and fries from there. This little lady has owned it for our know how many years but she used to work in a mine for 30 years and then she works as an

George
She’s a janitor in a mine for 30 years

Lisa RichartHernandez
and then she works in a brothel chef. And now she has her little roadside thing and they’ve been on like must place must stop places or whatever actually really good little burger.

George
It was really good burger and I guess they shakes must be fantastic because a bunch of truckers stop and people’s shakes.

Lisa RichartHernandez
You can pull over in your RV or whatever, or any car and grab a burger there. So shout out to our little burger place in Mina. That was pretty cool.

George
Yeah, definitely stop by there and tell him that we sent you.

Lisa RichartHernandez
Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, thanks, friends. And thank you for listening to us. Please share this podcast with your friends and tell other people subscribe to it and listen. If you want to go to our website, RView podcast comm you can subscribe on there and we will send you an alert while we have a new podcast coming up. Thanks. Bye Bye.

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