7-19-2020 Wendover, NV Part II

Rules, rules, rules.  Maybe it’s my imagination but the people here seem pretty damned bossy.  After spending so much time in Idaho which seemed like sort of a free country, we resent these pushy assholes.  Upon arrival at our campground, they were so nasty about the mask thing that, with that and the swarms of black flies, we almost turned around and left.  Part of all of this may be due to the fact that Wendover is split in two between Utah and Nevada.  That means in this one area, they have 2 mayors, 2 city councils, 2 fire departments, 2 sheriffs, 2 highway patrols and 2 city cop shops.  So that explains it:  Way too many people who enjoy telling you what to do. 

"Wendover Will"

Wendover Will is 90 feet tall and is lit with a quarter mile of neon tube.  He was created in 1952 by Bill Smith to replace a tall light that he had built in the 1920s.  For years, Wendover Will stood at the State Line Cobblestone Service Station at the gateway to Wendover.  He was donated from Wendover, UT to West Wendover, NV in 2004 and is now a famous landmark standing at the center of a round-about at the entrance to town. 

That entrance, before the construction of US Route 40 (not the I-40), was on the Victory Highway, sections of which are now relics, constructed in the 1920s and which traversed the nation from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans.  Here’s how it goes:  The Victory Highway got mostly paved over and replaced by US Route 40 which got replaced by the I-80.  The intention was to have a bronze eagle and a plaque at each county line where the Victory Highway crossed dedicating that stretch of highway to the county’s sons and daughters who served in WWI.  There are now only five of the original eagles known to exist, 2 in KS and 3 in CA.  The eagle here in West Wendover is a replica.  It is located on a small (~100 ft.) stretch of the original Victory Highway on which we were standing.

Rob really wanted to visit the Bonneville Salt Flats so we loaded up the cooler, hopped in the Jeepster and drove east of Wendover a few miles.  The flats are white salt.  And flat.  And white.  And salty.  And flat.  You can see Chicago from here.  This is a place where people build aerodynamically-streamlined vehicles and race them to see who can go the fastest.  It is tantamount, I think, to driving a fighter jet at full-throttle without ever rotating.  Only men know why this is a cool thing to do.  OK, so we saw that.

And we saw half a dozen scruffy looking animals, deer maybe, out on the back roads and 2 pronghorn antelopes grazing near Wendover Will.  They look like they sat in a bucket of white paint!

Deer named Scruffy and Scruffy Jr.

Antelope dining with Wendover Will

On to Winnemucca, hopefully a free country where we know that Basque Lives Matter!