| There was westher moving in that would
alter my plan for the day and the following morning. |
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| I made a brief stop in Eureka. It is
not a ghost town and has a population in the 600's. |
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| But there are old buildings. You know
how much I love old buildings, like the Eureka County Courthouse. |
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| The structure that is the home of the
current day Eureka Senior Citizens Center was completed in 1880 and
once housed a grocery store, variety store and a mortuary. |
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| This used to be Mau's Soda Fountain. I
don't know when soda fountains came to the West. |
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| The Eureka Opera House (1879)
still hosts music and community events. It is only one of two
theatres in the state with a horseshoe balcony. The other? Piper's
Opera House in Virginia City. |
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| What is now the Eureka Museum was once
the home of the Eureka Sentinel newspaper until 1960. |
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| The brick structure on the right is a
Masonic Lodge, but over time it had been a dry goods store, jewelry
store, barber shop, bath house, tailor shop, tinsmith shop and post
office. |
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| I arrived in Austin as the snow was
starting to fall. Probably the only attraction in Austin is Stokes
Castle. It was built on a hillside in 1897 by railroad magnate Anson
Phelps Stokes as a summer home for his family. He built it to look
like a tower he had seen in Italy. The family only lived there for
about a month. |
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| The wind was blowing and the snow was
starting to come down hard. |
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| Austin is another town where there
isn't much of anything. |
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| Population is less than 200. |
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| There is a plaque saying that this was
Nevada's oldest bank building. It is now a pub and what seems to be
a small library. |
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| I was going to spend the night at Cozy
Mountain Motel. However, given the winter weather and the overnight
forecast low temperature of 12 degrees, I figured that I might not
be able to leave the next morning. |
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| So I decided to push through the
weather, down the mountains and stay the night in a flatter, less
snowy area. I usually crop out the hood of the car in these road
photos, but I left it in this time to show the snow that accumulated
while I was parked in Austin. |
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| They may have shut down the road the
next morning. Even if they did not, there surely would have been ice
and driving down out of the mountains on ice was not an idea I
favored. |
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| When you are at elevation,
I guess spring precipitation is often going to be frozen. |
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| Heading west when I did meant that the
roads were not treacherous. There were just some snow patches on the
stretch out of Austin. |
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| Clear skies and sun in Fallon. |
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| I managed to get a room at the Comfort
Inn. It was the cheapest chain hotel I found online. It was adequate
given the situation. |
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| Dinner at Jerry's Diner. I had a nice
patty melt. |
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