EraTrip - info, photos and experiences of great places to visit

Reno, Dec 2007

admin — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 08:49:50 +0000

Last time we went to Reno in December 2007. Most of the time we stay at the Atlantis - far from the center but it is nice place. They have air! We stayed in Phoenix before and visited other older casinos and I usually run out of air pretty quick

Well, this time we had some plans - make photos of specific places like Museum of Art and Automobile Museum for our eratrip.com site. Well, Automobile Museum was a shocker! It was closed but the lawn in front of The National Automobile Museum is the most covered in dog poop lawn I ever seen!!! It was terrible… You could see that dogs of different sizes visited the lawn frequently. And some of those dogs were obviously huge! Maybe even wolves?!? Aweful, really!

We also discovered original Reno arch by accident, compare the new and original arch photos in our photo gallery.

Gold Panning - The very first time

admin — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 02:29:49 +0000

Gold panning is a lot of fun! As long as you’re not planning to get a lot of gold and resolve any financial difficulties you might have…

We went gold panning many times. The very first time was in the creek near Columbia Historic State park. We were in Columbia and we had our newly purchased gold panning gear in the car… so we just kept driving on Italian Bar Road until we got to a creek that looked promising. I’m from Ukraine, we don’t have poison oak there, and I’m glad I looked online so I knew if saw it… Well, poison oak was everywhere and I’m not kidding! Almost all green on the ground was poison oak, but we both never had poison oak rush before and we drove so far already so we carefully approached the creek and started to pan gold. Well, we didn’t find any, LOL and I think at that time we were just not doing it right! The place was awesome - clean cold water in the creek, birds singing, little fox jumped from the bushes right next to us, saw us and jumped back. Very nice place indeed! But no gold, LOL!

We panned for couple hours then decided to take a walk around the place. There was an entrance to the abandoned mine nearby, and we also found “Private Property”, “No tresspassing” signs up the creek, we could see dredge and other equipment behind the fence so maybe there was some gold somewhere in that creek…

Italian Bar Road at some point becomes unpaved road and very narrow. Not everywhere 2 cars can drive together so be very careful!

Thanksgiving 2007

admin — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 22:55:32 +0000

We went to Death Valley twice, both times during Thanksgiving. In 2007 the weather was great - warm, no rain, a bit windy (hehe, what do you expect in the desert!) but overall just awesome! We stayed in Furnace Creek campground. We liked the campground very much. It’s very conviniently located, it’s flat, all camps are very close to the road, there is water, restrooms, showers (I THINK there are showers but I’m not sure, we didn’t take any, LOL), there is gas station nearby. There were a lot of people so make reservations in advance! Reservations are accepted from October 15 through April 15, other time of the year campground is first-come-first-served. You can make reservations here.

Important notes:

1) ALWAYS have a canister with gasoline in your car. We drove to gas station to fuel and they were out of gas! Next gas station was next to our campground and over 20 miles away! Luckily Gala, friend of ours, was bold enough to go ask for gasoline from people in nearby RV camp and got almost 2 gallons! People gave us gasoline, didn’t accept any money and tried to feed us! It’s funny now but we were panicking! We had 2 kids with us, it was getting dark soon (dark equals cold in the desert in November!) and we were told there would be no fuel till tomorrow.

2) “No fuel at Scotty’s Castle”. Maybe there is now, but in Nov 2007 there was a gas station at Scotty’s Castle on the map, but in reality the gas station was closed for 2 years, so there is really no fuel at Scotty’s Castle! There were some signs on the road but we ignored them. It’s hard to decide to know what is updated more often - road signs or signs on the map.