Day 8: Cedar City UT - Battle Mountain, NV

Firsts, apologies for not updating last night.  It was a long hot and boring day, we didn't get back from dinner until pretty late and then I found a NASCAR race on the telly.

A leisurely start for Cedar City, where the local roadies were out in force.  The stoker of one of the tandems even understood what my "Dirk Hofman Motorhomes" T-shaped shirt was all about.  So, program Emily and away.  West to Modena, then north to Ely.  Here I would normally have turned west again through Eureka and Austin before turning north again on NV-305.  Emily had other idea and had me continue north to Wells, there to pick up I-80 for the rest of the way.  This route is unutterably tedious and to make matters worse, oncoming traffic was appearing in clusters with a gap of a Several of minutes between them.  Exactly as US-95 north of Las Vegas last year.  In other words, roadworks with single-lane traffic and long delays.  Happily by the time I'd got to wherever the choke pint was it had gone.

I made a brief stop in Elko to visit Walmart; I wanted flip-flops, a nail brush, a new iPod lead in case it's my problem, not National's and some anti-itch cream which doesn't work.  Nail brushes and adult-sized flip-flops could not be had for love nor money chiz.

And so to a Battle Mountain infested with the Dutch.  Three Dutch teams this year - Delft and Cygnus, plus a new Delft-designed machine for Ellen van Vugt.  We are down one Canadian and one Scotsman though, as neither Sam Whittingham nor Graeme Obree is coming this year.  Any reader with a long enough memory of HPV racing might recall the name Sergei Dashevski, the Russian nutter.  He is here though I've no idea what he's riding as their party is camped out somewhere in the sticks.

One follower of these ramblings might like to know that in of all places the liquor store in an obscure Nevada town called Battle Mountain, I found a bottle of Bruichladdich Rocks.  And very nice it is too.

Old states visited: Nevada.