Coming into Wyoming, we spotted some UFOs in the sky over the Wind River Mountains.

One of our trip goals was Pinedale, in the northwest corner of the state, where our daughter Isabel lives with her husband.

One of the major landmarks in Pinedale is the giant fish mounted above the local supermarket/variety store.

Isabel has recently opened a physical storefront for her online business, Isabel Jewelry. Dig the special gnarly pine logs that they found for the porch. The place used to be a pub.

She has some cases of jewelry on display, and a work area in back. It was great to see her in her store, with a lot of unique new pieces. One of Isabel’s new rings is hammered to look like a piece of wood.

Isbael’s strange-looking dog Rivers keeps her company at work. It’s possible that he was brought by the UFOs.

The commercial ebook version of The Ware Tetralogy is now available for purchase. This version will soon be for sale on other sites well.

The Prime Books paperback is still available in stores and from online booksellers such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powell’s Books, and others.

We drove through an Indian reservation into Idaho and headed east on the two-lane Route 20. By and large we managed to stay off the interstates throughout the trip. The little roads are mostly empty, and you can drive 75 mph pretty easily.

When I’m in these back-country regions, I often think it might be fun to live there. And I wonder about the concept of overpopulation. In a sense, there seems to be very much room still left in the U.S.

We ended up spending the night in Arco, Idaho, whose claim to fame is that at one point they drew their electrical power from an early atomic reactor nearby. Our landlady was somewhat obsessively tidy, and the motel was shipshape. The diner next door served “broasted chicken,” which we eventually learned is a trademarked process of pressure-frying.

The next morning, rather than getting right back into speeding, we went down some back roads in search of a natural bridge near Arco. I love the emptiness of the little roads, the quiet, the utter lack of people. A refreshing change from my life in the SF Bay Area anthill.

I liked this big hillside a lot, it seemed like the flank of a huge, friendly animal.

Eventually we made it to Idaho Falls, which has a fairly cute old-town section. One of the restaurants had a window in the shape of a wagon wheel, which was totally cool, like an art installation, and note the square pattern of logs around the wagon wheel window.

Some of the stores were empty, drained by big boxes like Wal-Mart on the edges of the town. I wonder if Wal-Mart will ever go away. Perhaps at some point, computerized marketing will give small retailers the same price breaks as the big boxes get. And perhaps people will lose their taste for big box shopping.

At the edge of town was an Idaho-shaped clock, something you don’t see every day.

Our daughter Isabel had alerted us to be on the look-out for potato barns, and soon they cropped up. They’re largely underground, the way potatoes like it, with a peaked roof that’s covered in dirt for insulation and to keep the light out.

We stopped by the Craters of the Moon National Monument, which is this immense lava flow. The reason there’s a level region across the bottom of Idaho with Route 20 in it is that, over the millennia, a series of volcanoes flattened it out.

Looking at the lava wasn’t as much fun as driving through the gold and green fields with the piney mountains.

Harvesters at work. I love the agricultural geometry of the scattered bales.

And so onwards towards Wyoming.

Sylvia and I just got back from nearly three weeks on the road, and I’ve got a lot of pictures to share.

The first place we stopped was in Stateline, California, by the Nevada border at Lake Tahoe. For some reason hotels and motels all give you three or four pillows apiece. All of them are dusty and sneezy. This place we stayed was really cheap, the Royal Valhalla, right on the beach by the Nevada border. Valhalla is the palace of Odin, King of the Gods.

I saw an interesting piece of rubber on the beach. Trash as archeological artifact. For the first part of the trip I was reading the new book Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. Despite my reflexive authorial envy of the guy’s success, I really liked the book. For the first few days of the trip, it was a nice steady treat to go back to. He has a nice line about some two-year olds and “their innocence of how hilarious they were.”

The dialogue in Freedom is very good. One of the main characters, Patty, is talking to her son Joey, who’s just heard about the Kabbalah from his aunt, but isn’t sure what it is. Patty sarcastically tells him:

“It’s very Important and Mystical—I think Madonna’s into it, which tells you pretty much all you need to know right there.”

“Madonna’s Jewish?”

“Yah, Joey, hence her name.”

We stopped for a break in Carson City and looked at the statehouse. They have this great painted border along the tops of the hallway walls, extolling all the various minerals that Nevadans have mined.

And a display of Nevadan artifacts, including an antler chair. Funny that Carson City, way over on the west edge, is the capital of the state. But, really, there’s very little in the middle of Nevada. I always like driving on the deserted highways like Route 50 and Route 6 that cross the state.

We came across a giant sand dune by Route 50, called Sand Mountain, so pulled over to check it out. Wonderfully quiet and hot. One or two tiny four-wheel ATV vehicles on it like botflies on a dead cow.

A little further on, we came to a Shoe Tree, that is, a tree bedecked with more than a thousand pairs of shoes. Evidently those in the know drive out here to the ass-end of nowhere and fling their less-desirable pairs of shoes into the tree. It’s a little like the Monarch butterfly trees in Santa Cruz, the branches draped with “life.”

We turned left at the perhaps-too-rural Austin, Nevada, and headed up to Battle Mountain, Nevada, to get a “safe” freeway motel for the night.

A half-mile from the freeway, Battle Mountain is rife with abandoned buildings, and below the railroad tracks it grows alarmingly seamy, like the Blue Velvet movie—at least in my mind.

Back by the freeway, outside our sterile Day’s Inn motel window, giant truck rigs rested as their drivers slept.