Okay.....now on to our trip for the day. You will see from the map that the drive from Eureka to Ely is only an hour. So you can leave after breakfast and get there in the morning, have a coffee, do something like the Nevada Northern Railway, have lunch downtown and do a walking tour and then drive on to Caliente. We arrived at about 10 am and had a coffee and picked up some leaflets to help us decide what we wanted to do for a few hours. Ely is a bigger town but still historic. It started out as a stagecoach stop along the Pony Express Route. It later became a copper and then gold mining town. There are plenty of things to do indoors and outdoors. In truth it is a place that is almost worth a stopover. (See link Things to do in Ely)
So what did we do. We headed into town which is so interesting. Two attractions that particularly caught our eyes where the fantastic murals on many of the buildings and the historic Nevada Hotel. The 1929 hotel is six stories tall and was the tallest building in Nevada well into the 1940's. The hotel has a classic casino, restaurants and is just wonderful. Be sure to take a look at some of the 20 murals and artwork downtown financed by the Ely Renaissance Society. Here is a short clip showing part of the town.
We really enjoyed Ely but it was time to take the two hour drive to Caliente. We needed to do our laundry and knew that there was a nice laundromat there which we had used on a previous trip. The drive to Caliente has a more 'out in the middle of nowhere' feeling. It is a slow decent from 6,437 ft to 4, 300 ft. (That surprises me. Because it is so warm, I thought we were closer to sea level.) We didn't see many cars on the road and the high desert was quite green when we passed through. We stopped in Pioche for a very late lunch.
When we arrived in Caliente we went ahead and check into the Rainbow Canyon Motel and then headed off to the laundromat (only to find it wasn't there!!!). Happily, there was another one just down from the train station so off we went. We did our laundry, had a walk around the station and then went to dinner at a restaurant up the street from our motel. Most of all we enjoyed the sound of several freight trains passing through during the day and night. It didn't keep us awake.
We first discovered Caliente when we traveled from Chicago to Las Vegas on Amtrak. Caliente has the most beautiful train station and it was hot there and we decided to go back some years ago. Unfortunately, we couldn't do it by train because Amtrak stopped going into Las Vegas. A real shame. So we went to Caliente by car.
Tomorrow.....off to (no, not Las Vegas) Henderson, Nevada.
