Day 21 - Las Vegas NV to Jean NV

Woke up to a fine sunny day in my beautiful hookers & drugs motel. Looked up the maps a bit and then headed off towards Jean, just outside of Vegas. Took the back roads and after a while found a bit of a dirt road leading under the tracks and over a small hill. Stopped here and climbed up to the top of the hill and made a little nest under the rocks where I had a good view of the tracks. Got out my book and waited for the trains.

And waited.

And then saw a chopper…

And lots of gliders being launched…

Eventually, at 4pm, a train came past. By now I was well and truely on the wrong sides of the tracks to get the good light, but oh well.

And then it was gone again.

It was all pretty quiet, with nothing much happening. I15 roared away as always. Other than that, the sun sank lower and that was about it.

And then the sun was setting.

 

I drove into Jean to get a meal and had a very average buffet meal that was not worth the price. I finished up and decided that rather than drive many hours to the nearest real town, or fork over oodles for a casino bed, I would sleep in the car. So I headed back to my nice quiet spot. It was well off the highway with no traffic, and I had my sleeping bag and a nice warm car, so I set about turning the car into Motel Zero, aka free accomodation. I set up my tripod and camera to take some time lapse photos of the stars, and ran through them for many hours while I read my book.

Unfortunately with all the light pollution from Vegas and Jean, the photos weren't that amazing.

About 1am I crawled into my sleeping back and rugged up nice and warm (with all the doors locked etc obviously) and went to sleep very quickly and soundly.