BODIE

IN MONO COUNTY

Friday

  • 4 pm: Left at 4 pm and drove through Tracy (where we got gas).
  • Got a speeding ticket in the central valley.
  • ~8 pm: Stopped at a general store in Oakdale to get firewood. Also ate dinner at the Taco Cati's taco truck nearby. The cheese store was closed, but I heard it was good.
  • 9:45 pm: Got a ton of groceries at Mar-Val in Groveland. Somehow a kitchen knife was $3.99. It was like 2012 prices.
  • Drove through Yosemite on our way to Bennettville.
  • Took a left into Bennettville but it was too dark—it wasn't accessible via the road, I think you have to get out and walk to the ruins.
  • Went back up to the main road and got to Virginia Creek Settlement in Bridgeport.
  • 1 am: Used a weird rotary phone in the outhouse to call the after hours phone number. Went into the main lobby to get a little map to our wagon.
  • The wagon was nice—pretty cold, went down to high 30s. They gave us trout food and materials for s'mores, which is cute.
  • Never used the firewood, but they had a fire pit we could use.
  • The wagon was excellent. Right on top of the river. No sound insulation at all. I had to tell people yapping right outside the wagon to shut up at 5 am.
  • Glamping vibes. Smoke detector and outlets IN the wagon??

Saturday

  • 9:30 am: Ate breakfast at the Virginia Creek Settlement. Free coffee! Excellent pancakes and chili omelette.
  • Fed the trout! VCS has a bunch of little games. Chess and tetris.
  • 11: Stopped at Dogtown on our way to Bodie. Couldn't see much, just a pile of rocks in the distance that used to be a wall.
  • Drove to Bodie—it was Bodie day!! Lots of cars, but still not that many people. Live music, food, dance classes, skit with poems, people dress in period gear.
  • Gas was super expensive near Bodie. It was like $6.45 a gallon.
  • Bodie was incredible—ton of old houses, still have the paper and furniture from the 1940s. One house you can walk into. Used to be a huge town of 7000 people.
  • Became a ghost town in 1973.
  • 3 pm: After Bodie, we wanted to see Masonic (abandoned mining village time). Tried to drive the Bodie-Masonic road, but we were in too low of a sedan (foreshadowing wahoo) and had to double back to the paved road we came on.
  • Drove back through Bridgeport (this is the expensy gas place).
  • Stopped at Jolly Kone to get coffee and a root beer chocolate ice cream float.
  • At around 5 pm, we stopped at Travertine Springs. It looked like basically no one was there until we got to the springs—wherein we were greeted by one naked woman running in a field (dragging around a red scarf and a stumbling man) and a very hungry dog named Lily who kept trying to have at our prosciutto.
  • There were these little worms in the pool. Some guy next to us asked ChatGPT if they were harmful. She said no, but the creepy little crawlers seem to like burrowing into our legs (to no avail). I wonder if they know they exist.
  • By around 6pm, we were on the road to Chemung. These are another set of ruins just north of Travertine. No one seems to go there either, and we were the only car on the road. I bet Dyusha there would be one other car there. He bet 2-3. He lost.
  • We encounted a very nice, scruffy man with a University of Oregon folding chair and a large pickup truck with a cool unfolding top. Him: I'm from Reno! Us: Cool! Him: You not gonna make it in that low little sedan. Us: Haha! What! Let's try it anyways!
  • Thus ensued The Big Long Drive (which was perilous and LOTS of fun).
  • Dyusha told me about the Pleiades constellation—and the independent lore developed by various societies about the once seven and then, suddenly, six sisters. Oral tradition!! Human knowledge bridging across time like a little handshake!! How cute!!
  • Not to be sappy but I would be happy to roll around Eastern California shucking rocks and staring at the stars for a very very very long time with this particular company.
  • Masonic was a little pile of rocks and a few piles of Big Rocks. We had a good climb and a good wee. The sunset was wonderful and the little Chevy Volt got a nice photoshoot.
  • Oh, I forget about the Bigger Longer Drive. The road after Masonic did not let up for a while. By the time we made it to the main road (after about 3 hours of communing with the rocks), Dyusha and I agreed we were so deeply RL'd into doing this random navigation that we might be top 0.1% in the world at parsing the specific rocky conditions of the Bodie-Masonic road. What a wonderful skill—one I hope to use sparingly in the coming decades.
  • At around 11 pm, we finally go to the Topaz Lodge and Casino in Nevada near the border. Dyusha brought in his keyboard and played "Slipping through my fingers" by ABBA.
  • Ate girl dinner like two little rats in the hotel room. We then engaged in a battle of reason (?) about rats and their digital consciousness.

Sunday

  • 11 am: Woke up at 11 am. People were banging on the door at the early hours to check if our toilet was fine. Apparently it was leaking?? Never heard a telephone screech at 5 am like that.
  • Hustled the hell out of Topaz Lodge and drove to Winnemucca Lake! We stopped by a Walmart in Gardnerville on the way and stocked up on the most Walmart American items one could want—chips and extremely unspicy guac/salsa, pink lady apples, two sandwiches, dried okra, bananas, and Ferrero Rocher. Importantly, I saw Shaqolicious gummies. Shaq will do pretty much anything for a buck and I respect the hell out of that.
  • 1 pm: Anyways, there was a nice hike around the lake, about 4-5 miles. We took a small break at another smaller lake (Round Top Lake) and Dyusha taught me some Russian.
  • There were lots of babies and dogs on the trail (with their respective owners, of course). Not that many people were on the trail in aggregate, though.
  • 4 pm: We happened upon some random service and I stood on a rock to call my friends. Dyusha tried to lift me up, bless him.
  • The hike ended around 6 pm and we high-tailed it back to the car. It was a race to get back to SF at a reasonable hour.
  • We drove the 4 hours back to SF but took a stop in Citrus Heights (incidentally, we learned, this is where the Golden State Killer was when he was apprehended decades after the crimes). I got a spicy chicken sandwich, which almost killed me, and Dyusha got the fattest, tallest, weirdest, most American-looking pie I've ever seen. It was at this very un-creatively named place called "Nation's Giant Hamburgers".
  • We played song association basically the whole way back after Sacramento. Started at "Slipping through my fingers" by ABBA and got to "Motherlover" by the Lonely Island—pretty good in my book.
  • We got back to SF at around 12:30 am on Monday. We were greeted in classic SF fashion—fake street cleaning signs that prohibited us from parking within 400 meters of my place of residence. One of these days, Dyusha will get and successfully challenge these "street cleaning" tickets. Mark my words.
  • To top it all off, we in fact did not listen to Giorgio by Daft Punk to close out the night. But we got a good night's sleep.

10/10 would go again.