A Tale of Two Cities (towns): Austin and Eureka [250928-29]

(Posted 251006) We spent the next two days visiting the next two towns along "The Loneliest Road in America" - two towns that were similar, but different at the same time.

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Sunday morning greeted us with the sounds of ATVs in the distance - a little annoying, but it beats the scampering of little rodent feet in the wee hours of the morning! When Tom went out to turn the mouse deterrent lights off, he was surprised to find no lights on under the coach. It took a little while to figure out what had happened, but apparently the 12v plug is a little loose in the power socket on the side of the van and Tom having rigged the control box + wiring the night before so that it was suspended off the ground by the cord eventually pulled the plug crooked enough to break the electrical connection. We're not sure at what point in the night the lights went out, but we'll be sure to support the weight differently next time - live and learn!

The wind had shifted during the night, putting us down wind of the cattle ranch across the street so we were unable to have our windows open during our morning routine. It also brought a plethora of flies with it, which started a days' long cycle of having to hunt-and-kill a small handful of intruding flies almost every time we opened one of our doors. (The electronic fly swatters continue to be one of the handiest tools we have in the coach 😉.)

We got back on the road a little after 10 am, with our first stop being just 3 miles down Highway 50 at the Shoe Tree, which is a large tree with hundreds of shoes hanging from its branches . . .

. . . and thousands more filling the ravine at its base.

"Why?" you might ask. One of the many legends behind the tree, as told on travelnevada.com, says:

Many decades ago, a newlywed couple was returning home, traveling eastbound on Highway 50 after being married at a Reno wedding chapel. While traveling this lonely highway, the couple got into their very first argument and pulled over on the side of the road… next to an outcropping of trees. In protest, the hot-tempered woman proclaimed that she would rather walk home. The man retorted with telling her that if she wanted to walk home, she could do it barefoot – then proceeded to grab her shoes and toss them up on the nearest tree. The man angrily jumped in his car and blasted off down the highway, leaving his new bride alongside the road to follow through with her threat of walking home. He pulled over at the first bar he encountered, and began drowning his sorrows. Lucky for him [and his new wife] an upstanding bartender convinced him to return to her in an attempt to make up. He did just that, they managed to work out their sorrows, and lived happily ever after. From that point on, the couple returned to the tree on their anniversary each year, tossing a celebratory pair of shoes around the same exact tree as an emblem of their unwavering love for each other.

But, imagine traveling down the Loneliest Road in America and approaching a massive cottonwood with thousands of pairs of shoes dangling from it. What would you do? Well, probably toss on a pair of your own, or some kind of relic to mark your presence. That is exactly what happened, too. A trip along Highway 50 is far from complete without lobbing a pair of sneakers over this famed tree. You too, should participate because why not? Just another #WeirdNevada experience that begs to be experienced.

(Note that this isn't actually the original Shoe Tree of legend; that one was destroyed by vandals in 2010. But it didn't take long for locals to designate this nearby tree as the replacement Shoe Tree.)

Another 60 miles east along Highway 50 brought us to the Pony Express Metal Statue, on the outskirts of Austin.

From there, it was a short drive up one of the hills in the Toiyabe Mountain Range to see historic Stokes Castle (which is more of a "tower" than an actual "castle"). Anson Phelps Stokes - mine developer, railroad magnate, and member of a prominent eastern family - had the house built between 1896-7 as a summer home for his sons. It was modeled after a tower Stokes had once admired in the Roman Campagna in Italy. Built entirely of hand-hewn, native granite, it originally had a kitchen and dining room on the first floor, a living room on the second, and a pair of bedrooms on the third floor. Each floor had a fireplace and plate glass viewing windows, the upper two levels had balconies with sun decks, and there was a battlemented terrace on the roof. When the home was finally completed in June 1897, the Stokes family used it for a whopping two months before essentially abandoning it (selling their mining interests and leaving the area) - rich people 🙄!

The views of the Reese River Valley must've been great for those two months . . .

. . . but now they belong to the squirrels that live in the cracks in the castle walls.

We might have wanted to spend a little more time by the castle, but the sound of thunder rolling across the valley ahead of the rapidly approaching storm encouraged us to get back down the dirt road as quickly as possible.

As we crossed Austin (a trip that only takes a few minutes) we saw a granite Travato parked on the street with no one inside, and regretted one of the trip preparations that we didn't have time to complete. During the latter part of our EotRT we had toyed with the idea of coming up with some sort of small gift to give other Travato owners we encountered on our travels (similar to the drink cozies we received in Iowa, Part 3 - Maquoketa Caves State Park [240529]). We decided that Tom's garbage cans would make a great gift, and when Dollar Tree got their seasonal bee placemats back in stock earlier this year, we bought out our store's supply and Christine sewed them all up into garbage cans using Tom's design (see the evening portions of the Michigan, Part 5 - Sault Ste. Marie [240613], Michigan, Part 6 - Shipwrecks and Endangered Birds [240614], and Minnesota, Part 5 - Grand Portage [240623] posts) and her sewing machine at home; we had brought all the bags with us. But we also wanted to make up "business cards" to go with the bags, with a QR code that led to a new/custom landing page in the blog describing the bag and introducing us - for cases like this one where we'd want to leave the bag on a Travato when the owner wasn't around; we ran out of time to do any of that. So without the cards, the first Travato we encountered on this trip had to go Bee-bag-less. 😢

On the far side of Austin we found our resting place for the night: the Austin RV Park - which is owned by - and on the grounds of - the Austin Baptist Church. Being a Sunday at 12:45 things were a little awkward since we had to walk past the "church hall" windows full of parishioners finishing up their whatever inside as we went looking for the restroom/showers, which are actually the church's. But we eventually got settled in, took showers, and had lunch.

And speaking of showers: the men's shower here was one of the oddest that Tom has come across in our travels. The restroom itself is arranged as a long narrow corridor, with the shower stall at the far end. The stall itself is small: roughly 2.5' square, with grab bars on two walls that made the interior space even smaller. The shower head was a 1' diameter disc centered on the ceiling overhead (with low-moderate water flow coming out it) - which worked okay for washing your hair, but made rinsing soap off anything lower than your head exceedingly difficult since you had to sort of contort yourself in a very confined space to get water to flow where you want it to (having some sort of washcloth might have helped, but Tom doesn't carry one to the shower house with him).

In contrast, the women's room has a tub-sized walk-in shower, and the room itself is much larger (large enough to also contain a utility sink).

The rain started during lunch, and the descriptions of Austin we read while eating made it sound like there wouldn't be much to see on a Sunday afternoon. We contemplated whether we should take advantage of a break in the rain by filling our water tank, hooking up shore power, and then hunkering down for the afternoon - or try walking the few blocks back into town for some exercise. Because we're horrible at making decisions, we ended up doing both: filling our water tank and hooking up power, and then heading out for a walk.

Since sightseeing wasn't in our plans, Tom left his Nikon in the T42 - so of course before we even got out of the residential neighborhood the church/RV Park resides in an entire herd of deer came bounding up the hill, crossed the street in front of us, and proceeded to wind their way between the homes. The second photo below shows them in the yard of one of the more interesting houses, which had a circular living room (apologies for the crappy iPhone zoom lens quality).

Austin is described as a "living ghost town", because it's a well-preserved example of what a boomtown / mining town from the 1860's silver rush looked like. We didn't really get a "living" vibe, though; an awful lot of the storefronts are closed/abandoned, and that - combined with the fact that the few that are still "occupied" were closed for Sunday - made it feel more like "a town waiting to die".

We found the lot that served as the tourist information board, though, and learned a little more about the town, and her most famous resident.

We also managed to get a photo in front of this sign, despite being without our tripods or even selfie-stick - by industriously dragging over a heavy steel picnic table and balancing Tom's phone on the edge of the bench. We eventually figured out that each of the "Loneliest Road" towns would have a sign like this, and we must've missed the one back in Fallon.

Amongst the historical photos posted along the street we found this one of Stokes Castle. It's not dated, but a number of the windows and doors appear to boarded up so it definitely is from the "abandoned" years - but still has the balconies intact.

Austin residents still have their sense of humor, though, as shown by the slogan at the bottom of the banners (each with a different historic photo) that lined the streets.

Austin civic pride was demonstrated in this mural at one end of town.

The rain held off for the rest of the evening, so we managed to cook a dinner of grilled green beans and shrimp with IP brown rice. As you may have noticed from the site photo above there are no picnic tables at the RV Park - but Tom managed to make do with a tree stump behind the T42.

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We didn't sleep as well Sunday night as one might have thought. The road noise from Highway 50 below us - as infrequent as the vehicles were - was a bit annoying. We were up at a little around 8 on Monday morning and did our morning routine, plus a dump and fill (which required repositioning the T42 a little, since "full hookup" sites tend to put the sewer holes where huge Class A RVs would expect them mid-body, which is completely wrong for a Class B van) and were on our way by 11.

Shortly before pulling out, this little guy decided to hop on to Tom's window sill. We figured he'd get bored and fly off, or at least get blown off once we got up to highway speed, but he hung on for the entire 70 mile drive east to Eureka. The first photo is from him hunkered down against the wind after we had been driving at 65 mph for about 10 minutes; Tom tried accelerating to 70 mph (the speed limit) for a few minutes to see if that would blow him off, but it didn't. The second photo is of him after we parked in Eureka - he took a few minutes stretching out his legs after the long ride, and then finally hopped off.

We arrived in Eureka at around 12:20 and drove to the the rest area at the far end of town where we were planning on staying the night. It was basically a large turnout with three sets of covered picnic tables around the edge and some garbage cans; so far every "rest area" we've seen in Nevada is a "no services" rest area, which means no water or toilets - although we've heard rumors that some of them might have vault toilets (yippee!). More than good enough for our needs, though.

We drove the few minutes back to the central part of town, parked, and had lunch. The goal for the day was to do the walking tour of Eureka - but the map for that isn't available online for some inexplicable reason; it's only available in printed form "from a number of businesses in town". So our next hurdle was finding a business that had the maps and was actually open on a Monday (apparently most of the businesses in town are closed on Mondays). We finally got the last map available at the Sundown Lodge and were on our way.

The walking tour was actually very well done. The buildings had numbered signs on them, and the map showed the location of all the numbers and had little paragraphs for each describing what each location was. In this first photo starting from the right to left (i.e. coming up the east side of the street from the south) we have the San Francisco Brewery (built in the 1870s - brewing beer except during Prohibition, when it made soda), the Eureka Post Office (built in 1880, and formerly butcher shop and then grocery store), the Eureka Opera House (built in 1879), and the Jackson House Hotel (built in 1877).

The Brewery has this pretty mural on its front:

And the ceiling of the Post Office still has its original tin ceilings, with floral and bird designs stamped into them.

The next block over started wth the Eureka Palisade Train Car (built in 1875), the Foley-Rickard-Johnson Building (built in 1879 and started as the first adobe house in Eureka, and went on to be a hardware store, book and stationary store, saloon, and a Wells Fargo Express office; now just a facade), the red Gold Bank and Paxton and Company Bank (built in 1881, still contains the original bank vault that survived a fire that destroyed the original bank - and that the second bank was built around - even though the building is now a private residence), the Eureka Mercantile (built in the 1870s), and the Owl Club Saloon and Roadhouse (built in 1880).

The Eureka Palisade Train Car is the only piece of rolling stock in Eureka County left from the Eureka & Palisade Railroad, which was built to haul refined ore from the Eureka smelters 80 miles to Palisade, where it connected with the Transcontinental Railroad. It normally contains the town's tourist info, but was "closed for the winter". The little plaza also happened to contain the town's "Loneliest Highway" sign which we managed to get a photo next to, despite - once again - having left the T42 without a tripod or selfie-stick (no, we really can't learn from our past mistakes), thanks to the lip on the concrete base of a lamp post (no, the angle isn't the best - but beggars can't be choosers).

Finishing off the second block we walked by The Old Raines Market (built in 1879, and has transitioned through a number of retail establishments), the Charles Lautenschlager Building (built in 1879; saloon -> bank -> pharmacy; with a nice pair of murals on its side), the Masonic Lodge (built in 1880), and the Urban Cowboy Bar & Grille (built in 1880, and now has a mural on the side that riffs off the beehive shaped brick Ward Charcoal Ovens, and cleverly provides a 3D effect in the lower right hand corner as exposed brick in the wall transitions into the pile of loose brick at the base).

Crossing over to the west side of the street to make our way back took us in front of the 180 Gallery & Gift Shop (built in 1877 and started life as a saloon before becoming the headquarters of one of Eureka's biggest charcoal production companies), which had an adorable sheep sculpture out front and a mural celebrating the Basque immigrants and Nevada sheepherders on the side of the building.

Further up the street The Afterlife Antiques & Oddities Shop (built in 1868; grocery store / mercantile with 17 room hotel upstairs -> Eureka Cafe -> antique shop) which contains the last remnants of the Eureka underground tunnels - and has been featured on the "Ghost Adventures" reality TV series.

Across the street from our starting point was the Eureka County Courthouse (built in 1879).

One street over was the Sentinel Museum (built in 1879) which housed the Eureka Sentinel newspaper until 1960 and still contains the original press room and equipment from its newspaper days. It would have been neat to visit - but isn't open on Mondays. 😞

We finished off our walking tour by taking some side streets to find two churches: the Methodist Church (built in 1881; open for services until 1900; was an auto garage in the 1940s; renovated in the 1980s which is when the stained glass was added; now houses a liquor company) and St. James Episcopal Church (built in 1872 and operated through 1907; closed for a long while, but now offering Sunday services again).

After completing our 1.5 hour walking tour, we drove a block over to park in the lot of the Eureka Public Library to use the WiFi from the parking lot for the rest of the afternoon and evening. Dinner in the coach that evening was leftover rice with tinned Herring Fillets in Mango Pepper Sauce (an old Aldi find from last year) and southwest corn for Tom, and leftover rice and quinoa cakes for Christine. We started hearing the sounds of rain as we were publishing the now-completed first Nevada post, which turned into a heavy downpour with thunder and lighting as we were preparing the coach for departure. And then we heard this lovely sound blasting out over town:

It was vaguely reminiscent of the tornado warning sirens we heard in Kansas last year, but that didn't seem very likely in Nevada. Was it some other sort of severe weather warning we should know about? A quick attempt at a Google search turned up nothing useful (just some old references to a number of Nevada towns being "sundown towns" back in the old days, but that sort of thing should be illegal now). We decided to try asking at the gas station (one of the few businesses open at that time on a Monday) up the street. Christine went in and sort of got an answer from the attendant - who was not a native English speaker - that the siren is "because an accident happened" (and isn't anything for us to worry about) and that another one would go off at 9 pm, but that's just the curfew warning for the town's minors.

Feeling better now that we weren't in imminent danger of getting pounded by golf-ball sized hail or swept away by a flash flood, we proceeded back to our Rest Area for the night. By now, two other RVs had arrived and taken the first and third spots, so we nestled in between them and got ready for bed.