Nine

The view up here is terrific and it lasts all the way down. With the excess heat of the climb gone, the wind is getting pretty cold. Also, when I am finally down one hour later, I am starving. Someone very thoughfully has placed a kiosk at the start (or end) of the trail. I buy a hot dog which I eat in car. It is the ideal place to get warm again, since it was parked in the sun for two hours.

A bit further on there is another three mile boardwalk trail, described as being easy and also promising hot springs along the way. For some reason I cannot muster the energy to do that, too. Sissy European, again, I guess. But as a compromise, they have placed the Sulphur Works directly at the road. Sulfide gas streams from the earth and thus the place smells daringly of rotten eggs. Earlier, a restaurant and a bath were placed here, after sulphur mining turned out to be not exactly profitable. How one could stay here for more than five minutes is beyond me, though. Not to mention having dinner.

Leaving the park, it is time for decisions again. Originally, I intended to go to Susanville, if only for the name, and then from there to Reno, which would probably be a good place to spend the night. Or not, come to think of it, if I should retain enough funds to make it back to San Francisco. A road sign proposes Truckee. That’s at least as nice a name as Susanville and also slighty closer to Yosemite which I might as well do if I am here already. The road leads through Indian Valley (not yet being re-named to be politically correct) which is one of those River, Road, And Steep Walls afairs. There also seems to be a railroad line in the mix. Next is Quincy, a lovely town somewhere in the mountains. (Did I mention Holywood writers already?)

From there it is about 80 minutes to Truckee. I get so used to the driving that at first I shot passed my destination. In my defense, they have a bypass and the town is spread out over quite some area. I turn around and after some more confusion, involving poor road signs and a map way to large in scale, I finally manage to find the ‘historic center’—the usual two blocks of a single street, called Donner Pass Road here.

Finding a motel is difficult again. There presumably is an area with the usual suspects, but after some attempts of finding it, I just give up and ask at the only hotel downtown if they may have a room. They do.

The hotel is located at the main downtown intersection, has been here since 1873 with a short interuption due to a fire in 1909. Quickly re-built thereafter, it still awaits the installation of the elevator promised by the owner just then. It was refurbished carefully in the 1990s, and thus is a lovely odd place with uneven floors, strange turns of corridors and even stranger layouts of the rooms. I get an American-style room which means that I don’t have to share my bathroom. That would have been an European-style room. I refrain from telling them that we do have in-room bathrooms in Europe now, too. Said bathroom is worth the extra money. It retaines the original interior, probably from 1909. The bathtub is a cast iron and enamel claw-foot model with a complicated shower curtain around.