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2008 Nevada Extraterrestrial Highway & Lunar Crater Tour -
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 on Highway 375 due to the fact
that very few motorcycles have the fuel-capacity to make it across this stretch.
That's when he informed me that the single gas station between Alamo and
Ely, Nevada (Blackrock Station) had recently stopped selling gasoline due
to the high price of gas. Thus that sign I had seen a while back
indicating that there was no gas for the next 150 miles actually should
have read 'No Gas for the Next 246 Miles'. It is times like these when I
thank the gods for allowing me to own a GS Adventure, because I can easily
squeeze out 300+ miles on a single tank of fuel. Any bike with a range
less than 246 miles would have to  divert further west to Tonopah, Nevada
(~160 miles from Alamo, Nevada) in order to refuel to make it further
north. In any case, NDOT should really update that sign!
 For the next 45 minutes I sat in
the middle of the Nevada desert bullshitting with this flagger. It turns
out that he grew up in the area and planned to retire on a ranch he owns
just south of Ely, Nevada. He was amazed that I was going to and had
actually heard of the Lunar Crater. He obviously had worked for NDOT for
several years, because he gave me directions based on the highway mile
markers, and I would come to find that he was pretty much right-on. As we
talked, I realized that this guy and I had a lot in common. We both loved
the Nevada desert, had a passion for motorcycles, and both had almost
identical electrical problems with Chevy S-10s.
 After 45 minutes, it seemed like I
had a new best friend in the Nevada desert. Finally the pilot truck came
and motioned for myself and the now two other waiting cars to follow him.
The flagger changed his sign to 'slow' and wished me a safe journey home.
The next five miles of Highway 375 were comprised of sanded-oil, which
basically rode like hard-packed sand. I kept my distance from the pilot
truck that was kicking up rocks and dust. Luckily the wind direction was
perpendicular to the highway, so most of the dust that the truck was
kicking up was abruptly swept away by the strong wind.
After I was back on pavement, I
checked my GPS and found that it was telling me that the fastest route to
Lunar Crater was to take Twin Springs Ranch Road north to Highway 6. This
bypassed Warm Springs, and from what I could tell, looked like it might
save several miles of backtracking. However, based on my experience with GPS
routing in the Nevada desert, I was highly suspicious of the  quality of
this road. I've had my GPS route me onto mining roads that would pretty
much eat any modern-day yuppie SUV, yet my GPS claimed that the road was
the fastest 'on-road' route. GPS units have been dumbed-down over the
past several years so that almost anyone with a finger can just press a
button and have the little black box tell them where and what to do. I'm
sure most people are enamored by the technology and can't even imagine how
something so high-tech could be completely wrong. I have to laugh to
think how many people in zero-clearance passenger cars end up on
four-wheel drive trails or buried axel-deep in desert silt beds, hundreds
of miles from no-where, all because their little black box told them to go
there. In my experience, 62.4% of all the people in the world are
retarded - including some of the people who put the road information in
your GPS, so before you blindly listen to that little plastic box, use
some common sense!
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