Reno Nevada, obviously not a patch on Vegas but a lot of smaller casinos. Real warm and dry image still thousands of feet up above sea level. I always imagined that the desert areas were at low altitude.

A beautiful sunset over the mountains in the Nevada Desert. It appears our first drama has happened. The train has come to a standstill here at Winnemucca, Nevada, apparently due to a signal problem on the lines which stops us moving on until the signal problem is fixed. Announcent is that a repair crew is on the way as we speak but we're stuck until it gets fixed, who knows how long. The problem this causes is that our scheduled arrival in Chicago was meant t...

The most amazing thing is realizing that so much of the US is so high above sea level. Once you leave the coastal plains you climb up over the mountains to about 6,500 ft. Down the other side onto Nevada plateau, only to realize nearly all of Nevada is about 4,300 ft above sea level. You sit in the train watching the wild west go by only to discover how high it is. Just amazing.

It was a long drive through the night from Las Vegas to San Francisco and as I had done all the driving up to this point I was totally exhausted. Thanfully Sue was ok to drive on the wrong side and she drove the vast majority of the way through the night. I took over again once we came close to San Francisco and the traffic started to get heavier. After checking in to our hotel we headed off into the heart of the city for breakfast at Lori's Diner in the heart o...

From Hoover Dam we headed into Vegas to check out some of the sights. We decided to only spend a few hours having a look around as we were continuing on to San Francisco for a 2 day stay before joing our train for the trip over the Rockies. The Vegas strip is certainly something to behold, so we stayed longer than planned to see it at night with the strip lit up like a xmas tree, pretty spectacular.