Lady Gaga showed up at her sister's graduation wearing an outfit designed, apparently, to piss off the highschool from which she graduated but in which she was harassed as a student.

Details here .

This is the third part of a multi-part post. To go to the beginning, go here.

The overall feeling of this part of Nevada – maybe all of Nevada – is vastness. Overwhelming vastness. From the top of every pass, the view is of a huge valley and a couple more mountain ranges. But, I think that is deceptive. I think it would look alot smaller filled with trees and houses. It is the emptiness that makes it look so huge. BTW, all the wide-formate photos are double clickable to enlarge.

We had been over this pass and into this basin about five years ago. Mike said that a mining area about two mountain ranges over, the Seven Trough Range, was very interesting. We didn’t have any maps that went that far east, so Mike loaned us his. Michele made sure we didn’t get lost even though, often, we seemed to be in the middle of nothing.

When Mark Twain got to Nevada, some Chamber of Commerce type told him If this place had water, it would be paradise. Twain answered You could say the same thing about hell. Actually, I think the Chamber guy was on to something. Where ever there is water, a spring or a well, there are trees and ponds and grass.

The great majority of the roads we drove on were official county roads with numbers and everything. When I asked Mike how good the roads were, he told me OK but not as good as the road coming into the Smoke Creek. The Smoke Creek Road was in Washoe County and they have a huge tax base with Reno and we would be going into Pershing County with alot less money for road maintenance. But the roads were great and Michele – who drove most of the time with me riding shotgun only with a camera – never had to shift into low range, even when we got off the county roads.   

We drove by scenes that looked like paintings – here photoed by Michele and painted by Mike – who I think of, here, as Michael Moore, as in Michael Moore paintings.

– and antelopes or – it is hard to be sure – cows bred with greyhounds.  

Sunday night, we camp on the fan from Seven Trough Canyon – for which the Range is named – overlooking Sage Valley.

 To be concluded.

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Why it is Death Valley and the Smoke Creek? I don't know, but that is how Michele and I refer to them. The Smoke Creek is a huge playa about two hours north of Reno and we will be visiting friends. From there we will probably wander east to a ghost town named Vernon in a small mountain range called The Seven Troughs. My favorite desert is around Death Valley but Michele considers that area too extreme and much prefers northern Nevada. It does have its allures.

For reference, the picture above (double click to enlarge) is from our friends place, and in the Google Earth capture (also double click to enlarge) below at the green patch in the lower left hand corner. Reno is in the circle at the upper right hand corner of the capture and the the big lake is Pyramid Lake. 

The space shuttle Atlantis returned from orbit from orbit, a couple of days ago. For the last time. It didn't even make the front page of the New York Times.
I am not a shuttle fan. I think that the shuttle and the space station have a symbiotically wasteful relationship.

The space station – which does almost nothing useful except prove man can stay in space for awhile if we spend enough money – justifies the space shuttle by giving it a place to go. The space shuttle – which does almost nothing except give a very small group of highly motivated, over competent, pilots and technicians the ride of their lives at our expense – justifies the space station by having a place to go.  

But that is just my opinion and it is the end of an era. This video is a little slow but what a great way to come home from a vacation (or three day weekend)! Probably the best thing is to double click to take you through to You Tube because, for some reason way beyond my expertize, the picture is too big here.