After visiting family in Salt Lake City (in 2016), we decided to drive back via another route then we came. We wanted to see the salt flats, and from there, we would see. On these kinds of driving vacations, we never plan too far ahead; we take a general direction, and after a couple of hours, we see where we are heading and pick a motel a few hundred kilometers down the road, and that’s then our goal. I like adventure, but it is also nice to know you have a bed for the evening halfway through the day; I still remember the days that you are still looking for a place to stay in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere.

On this particular day, we decided to take a decent-looking gravel road south just after the salt flats and drove on this road for half an hour when we saw a smaller dirt road going more southeast. The road was pretty good, but we also drove a normal front-driven car, so I started to worry a little, especially when the first car we saw was a big pickup after an hour or so. I thought that the worst that could happen was that we had to drive all the way back to the main road, but after a little while, I saw a tiny car driving in our direction, so I knew we would be fine.

The nature was really nice, desert-like with hills and lonely. I think we drove around 5 hours on these abandoned dirt roads, and we saw just a couple of cars and the small collection of houses that you can see in the picture above. We were not far from the Goshute reservation I see on the map now, but we didn’t know that then, the little village is called Callao and was part of the pony express. I had all kinds of fantasies going on driving on these lonely roads through this tiny village, where America still is large, and the rule of law seems far away, at least physically. But we saw no one walking around. Finally, we saw civilization doming in the distance, and we knew our little adventure would soon be over.