What a pleasant surprise! Going north from Tahoe to Reno, we did a detour over to Virginia City, which was an 1860's - 1870's mining boomtown; and has been preserved in its original buildings. Of course all the businesses are now tourist oriented, but the buildings are quite interesting. The Saloons all look like they probably did back then, and the bank, which is now something else, still has its original vault that held all that gold and silver. There are two original churches, one a Catholic Cathedral which is really beautiful.
They have tours into one of the defunct mines which was interesting.
The town itself is built on the side of a very steep small mountain/large hill and when you come around the last turn in the road and see it on the hillside, it is quite enchanting. There is almost nothing modern or commercialized (except a couple of gas pumps at the edge of town).
The second thing that was quite a surprise was how absolutely beautiful the desert mountains were on that back road detour. They are actually some of the mountains that surround Reno, and we would never have gone up into them except to go to Virginia City. By the way they do not look like the Bonanza tv series showed them - surprise, surprise.
The trivia for today is about the drinking water in Virginia City: it is piped in (I forgot where from), but it is probably a hundred miles at least (we saw the map). The pipe was layed back in those boomtown days because the ground contains arsenic and water wells are not an option. The map displayed showed all the mining claims from the records of that day, plus the water supply, plus a ventilation shaft used by all the mines which came out the side of the mountain, and cost 4 million dollars to build (4 mil back then).
So, then we got on IH 80 and headed toward Salt Lake, and got as far as Winnemucca for tonite.
Later, Marilyn
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