We traveled over the usual route between our home in California and the Boise, Idaho metro area. The main road on our route is I-80 where we go to U.S. 95 to Idaho. We’ve found that the longest leg of our road trips has become the section of our route between our home and Vacaville, California. The traffic has become so heavy that this stretch took four hours on our last trip, rather than a more normal time period of 90 minutes. The GPS receiver showed our average speed to be 27 miles per hour. Once past this long, long slow-and-go drive, the traffic usually picks up for the remainder of the trip.

Here I am at the wheel "On the Road Again"

We’ve yet to drive straight through to Boise. We’ve always broken our trips to Idaho into two segments spending the first night in Boomtown. However, we have driven all the way home from Boise in one day. When we finally reached Sacramento, it occurred to me that, with normal traffic conditions, we should have reached Boomtown, Nevada by this time.

We thought all the slow traffic was behind us when we came to another slow down just east of Sacramento. I turned on the radio to try to find a local station with a traffic report to find out how long we could expect to be in slow traffic. By the time I finally was able to tune in a Sacramento news program that was telling us why the traffic was slow, we had traveled about two miles and we were just passing the fender bender accident mentioned on the radio. Traffic then broke loose and we had smooth sailing all the way to Boomtown.

On our way to Boomtown we stopped in Auburn, California to find a place to eat and to top-off the motorhome fuel tank. The slow beginning of our trip consumed more gasoline than normal. We normally get all the way to Boomtown before refueling. I found a fast-food place to buy our evening meal that served old fashioned hamburgers, fries and malts.

The sun set while we were eating dinner and shortly after that we were back on I-80 heading east. When we arrived at Boomtown we stopped only to refuel. I didn’t feel confident that we would have enough gas to get all the way to Winnemucca. This was an unusual stop for us because we pulled into Boomtown and left without visiting the casino.

On past trips we’ve parked in the Boomtown parking lot for the night and continued our trip the next morning. On this trip we needed to get to Winnemucca before we could retire for the night. So, into the night I drove. Just before reaching the off-ramp to Winnemucca, we saw fire in the mountains to the north of us. It looked as if one whole mountainside was engulfed with flames. We reached Winnemucca at about 1:30AM. Our plan was to find a casino parking lot to park for the night. We cruised from one end of town to the other. Along the way we found that the casinos here were small and didn’t seem to have a motorhome parking area. We saw two very full, RV campgrounds in town, but I really didn’t want to pay their price just to park for a few hours. We had to get back on the road early the next morning.

As we entered town from the west, we passed a Flying J Travel Plaza. So, when we reached the East End of town, I turned the motorhome around and headed back to the truckstop. Some of our friends, in our RV club, have told us that they often spend the night parked in a motorhome parking area at Flying J truckstops. This would be our first time to do the same.

The Flying J was a good place to stay because I wanted to top-off the fuel tank in the morning before getting on the road. Also there was a fast-food place next door and across the street, making it convenient to grab a quick breakfast in the morning. We finally were crawling into bed at 2 o’clock in the morning. It had been a very long day.

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