Today was the first of five days where we will be riding everyday as we now need to cover some distance as we head north for Seattle. The decision was to cover the longer distance days first as we are fresh from much chilling in Vegas and Amangiri, so today was a 520km ride to a hotel along the extra terrestrial highway in a town called Rachel in the middle of the Nevada desert. After a beautiful 5 hour ride through some of the most dramatic landscape in existence, we arrived just as the heavens opened to cool this peculiar little spot.
Todays ride…
When designing the route I asked Max to weigh in with any places he would like to see and stay at whilst on our trip. He said there was only one, and it was this place that he had seen on a video and was intrigued because it is right next to Area 51…. and he has a sci-fi alien thing going on. Anyway, whilst still in London, I booked “the Area 51 Cabin” which is implied as the luxury option when staying at Little A’le’inn. It turns out that the entire town of Rachel is just one vast, spread out trailer park without any seemingly obvious purpose for its existence here in the middle of the desert. There is no commerce, or factories, or mines so I am unsure why anyone would live here which just adds to the oddity of this group of people living here in the middle of nowhere?!?
Our luxury accommodation for the night, next door to the trailer of Billy-Bob and his sister-wife Ruby-Jo. Nice Max!
We checked into our “luxury” cabin for the night and then did a short ride to the back gate of Area 51 to get some pics whilst hoping not to get shot. The drive up to the back gate is the towns “must do” activity when visiting Rachel. Needless to say, there is nothing to see other than a gate, a thousand cameras and a multitude of signs threatening an instant death if you touch the gate, cross the line or take a photo within 100m of the gate!!
101m from the back gate of Area 51!!
Whilst we didn’t experience any UFO activity whilst out here, we did experience some of the weird Area 51 activities! At around 11pm, just as we had switched off and were falling asleep, there was a massive roar and the entire cabin shook like an earthquake was about to swallow the entire town. It turns out the military was testing some new jets! The roar and tremor were immediately followed by a sonic boom, the combination of which had us hit the roof with fright and then spend the next 30 minutes outside watching these jets roar back and forth! The event just added to the strangeness of this place.
