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He'd size them up, quote a price—a dollar a foot was the norm—and if they didn't like his rate, he'd keep raising it until they agreed. 10007 BRIDGE ST. Back in the day, folks would bog down, put a match to a pile of brush, and out Thomas would come with his draft horses.gov HIT THE ROADLincoln Highway Association Twelve state chapters across the country. In Eureka, I knocked on the door of the Jackson House Hotel, an 1880 brick edifice that stands alongside the grand Eureka Opera House." (It turns out the hotel closes during the winter, but opens again come spring.) The old road is not just remembered here, it's celebrated—you can still find streets called Lincoln Way or Lincoln Highway. I stayed for a few minutes, gazing out over the golf course. Blinkered by concrete walls on either side, I was making good time but had no idea where I was or whether I was passing through farmland or desert.patricepress. The sun was slinking toward the mountains as I arrived at Fish Springs, once a ranch owned by a legendary codger, John Thomas.org READING LISTThe Lincoln Highway: Main Street Across America, by Drake Hokanson (University of Iowa Press, 21); www. I assumed that it had long since vanished, but then I saw it off to the side, near a bus stop overlooking a golf course: WESTERN TERMINUS, LINCOLN HIGHWAY.After a pit stop, I was tearing across the basin, enjoying clear skies and open country. Jay took me to a pristine section of the 1913 road. Today Fish Springs is a National Wildlife Refuge, overseen by ranger Jay Banta, the Utah director of the current Lincoln Highway Association. I stopped at each to stretch my legs and savor the lonesomeness that such a posting must have entailed. Thanks to the enthusiasm of modern-day tourists, a broad, well-maintained gravel road now overlies both bygone routes.amazon. THE FACTS WHERE TO STAYPeery Hotel DOUBLES FROM 129." (Californians have always loved their asphalt. When they laid out the road across central Utah, the Lincoln Highway Association chose to follow the general route of the old Pony Express.

"Not enough business," said the proprietor of the restaurant across the street, "since the mines laid off a thousand people last December. Then I hit bumper-to-bumper traffic and within an hour, I was fighting my way over the Bay Bridge at rush hour. This is basin-and-range country, an endless alternation of upthrust ridges and flat seas of غير مجاز مي باشدebrush.) In the threadbare mountain town of Austin, 70 miles up the road, I peeked into the splendidly creaky International Café, a former hotel shipped in its entirety from Virginia City, Nevada, in 1863. The old stage stations are still there, mostly reduced to crumbling cairns surrounded by chain-link fence: Simpson Springs, Boyd Station, Canyon Station. In Auburn, a historic mining city in the Sierra foothills, Lincoln Highway markers are posted along the route at almost every intersection.comFish Springs National Wildlife Refuge Campsites nearby. The official end point lay near the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, a fine-arts museum. If jobs were scarce, enthusiasm for the Lincoln Highway was not. When they crossed into California, the hard part of their journey was behind them.fws. From time to time I thought I could spy traces of the old highway: a dirt track winding through the hills around me.truckeehotel. As I crossed the California border and passed through the mountain town of Truckee, I remembered something that Jay Banta had told me: "Someday I'm going to drive the whole highway in a Model A," he said, "meeting nuts like me along the way." The next day, I passed through the remote community of Callao, Utah, where Kearney's Ranch hotel still sits by the side of the road like an empty ghost.

And if they did, I doubted they knew the vastness it demarcated, the toil and patience it implied.; 800/659-6921 OR 530/587-4444; www. instant electric water heater tap What I felt must have been a hundredth of the bittersweet emotions those words no doubt brought to adventurers who endured mud, rain, breakdowns, and weeks on the road to read them (my journey took only four days). The first drivers must have felt the same. I then crossed over Schellbourne Pass to the Steptoe Valley, hitting asphalt again on U. A marker once stood in front of the museum, near where a blue-tiled fountain sputters today.comA Complete Official Road Guide of the Lincoln Highway.

TRUCKEE, CALIF. 110 W. A sign out on the salt flats read, IF IN NEED OF TOW, LIGHT FIRE.peeryhotel. Two of the three mirrors over the ornate bar are original; the third was shattered long ago by a bullet that had passed through the skull of a patron. Descending into the Central Valley, I was sucked into the maw of the California superhighway system and propelled southward like a jet.S. "The Pony Express is so romanticized, but all it proved was that mail couldn't profitably be moved overland," he said." After three days in the desert, I thought the forests of the Sierra Nevada were paradise.

Forty miles south, in Ely, I picked up Highway 50, which roadside signage touts as THE LONELIEST ROAD IN AMERICA. JEFF WISE is a contributing editor for Travel + Leisure. Looking around at the people strolling about, I couldn't imagine that many ever noticed the tiny obelisk, let alone understood its significance. One traveler who rode the Lincoln Highway in 1919 noted appreciatively, "Entire route down grade over bitumen surfaced concrete roads lined with palm trees, through peach, orange, and olive ranches and vineyards. At the hamlet of Middlegate I chatted with Russ and Fredda Stevenson, owners of the Middlegate Station honky-tonk, who invited me to drive the mile-long stretch of original Lincoln Highway on their property. It was just a couple of hundred miles to the highway's end in San Francisco, all of it well paved. By the time I reached a friend's house downtown, I was exhausted. Every few minutes another car or truck passed. I encountered only one other car, driven by a dusty-looking fellow who stopped to chat as we drew alongside each other; turns out he was a geode prospector, coming from his claim. After the solitude of the Pony Express Trail, it felt like Mardi Gras. 93 in Nevada