More Adventure in Ely…

A few days after my train ride…went back down to near the train station and tried out the ol’ timey cafe that’s been there for over 100 years. It has a B&B attached. Off a ways down the street is the train station. Food was really good. And there was enough of it that I took half of it home for the next morning.

Nice little B&B. All nicely remodeled too. If you’re looking for a place to stay in Ely, this place is kind of nice. Restaurant has great food too.

A few days after that, I drove the car up to the mine, because I wanted to take a look at the town of Old Ruth. The town site is right outside the copper mine.

Drove as far as I was allowed alongside the mine, all the way up to the mine offices. 3-4 miles beyond where the train had taken us a few days before. And then access further on had to be authorized and I didn’t want to bother with that so came back along the same road and this time, drove through the old town of Old Ruth which is off the highway a bit.

Wasn’t much as far as historical stuff and old towns goes, but there is a tiny RV park attached to the local bar. Next time I’m in Ely, I’ll go visit that place to see if there’s anything interesting about it.

And as I got back to town, still had the history bug so stopped at the Ely Museum to look around. They ask for $5 at the door.

And outside they have a bunch of old mining equipment…and some pioneer cabins restored. Kind of interesting.

Here’s the old train station. Doubled as the station masters home…

That was pretty neat. I like to see old houses all filled with furniture and what not. Like the owner just stepped out for a few minutes.

And then back into the main museum building, in the back room is another section of a little more modern stuff, like from the ’30’s on…

And then there were some skeletons…the one on the left is some giant bear that was killed near here back during pioneer days. Or something like that.

After that busy day, I didn’t do much wandering around. And since the RV was right on a main highway, I didn’t do much bike riding. Enjoyed a couple Netflix movies and played on the computer mostly. And then my week at Valley View was almost up. I remembered seeing what looked like and old RV park at the end of town so went and investigated. And the owner happened to be there. Sure enough, it had two open spaces, there was Wifi but only as far back as the space I was interested in. And that space had lots of shade. The pad was newly re-graveled and leveled, the services were adequate, and the large shade trees had been recently trimmed. So told the owner that I was going to move there in a couple days, got the Wifi address for his modem, entered it into my phone and got on line to test making sure it had connection to the internet, and let him know I’d stay at least a week, probably a month.

And two days later, I left the Valley View RV Park and drove downtown to my new park. The owner had something planned out of town so he wouldn’t be there for an entire week but they have a late check in kiosk attached to the building shown in the background. That’s the laundry room. Very inexpensive to do a load too. Why I was so keen on staying here was that nearly the entire town was within a bike ride from the RV park. Very cool riding around a small town like Ely. And with downtown only 2-3 blocks away from where I was parked, convenient too.

And there’s the RV park’s office in that building (next picture) but there’s no outside Wifi antenna. The owner has the modem sitting on a shelf close to that window on the side of the building, inside. Not the best setup since that building has metal siding, but I could get a pretty strong signal as shown by my phone if I had a direct view of the window.

And it turned out that my phone doesn’t have a way to show passwords after they’re entered so I couldn’t get it off my phone to input into my tower computer like I’d planned. Doh!

Took nearly a full day for me to remember that I can use my phone tethered to the computer. So I set up the phone, positioned it in the drivers side window facing the window in the above picture so I had direct line of sight, connected it to my computers USB port with a long USB cable I have, and boom, high speed Wifi. Pretty slick what you can do these days. I was getting 5-6 Mbps download speeds with that setup. Good enough to stream movies, especially since no one else in the RV park was using Wifi. Since the phone was just connected to the parks Wifi and passing it on to my equipment, there were no data charges from the phone company. Here’s a look further into the RV park the other direction. There are only 9 spaces and the first 5 could get Wifi I suppose. My space, when I had the nose of the RV out far enough, was in the right place that I could see the office’s window with the modem in it perfectly. Line of sight means a great signal.

And here’s a shot of the rest of the park. That red SUV is in front of the last RV space. All of these sites face south but the tree above my space made receiving satellite problematic. I got up there and trimmed a few branches but really, more trimming was necessary. The owner told me he’d paid $10,000 for tree trimming the end of the last year. It looked like it, but they didn’t get my tree far enough back for my setup. Well, no big deal really.

And after my first couple days, it was plain that staying longer than a week was called for so I paid for a month. At 6500 feet, Ely (E-lee) has some fine weather with cool nights, warm mornings and evenings here in June. While down in Pahrump, they were already seeing triple digits. Mid-day could be pretty hot in the 80’s in Ely, but only for 3-4 hours. Excellent biking weather nearly all day. And I did ride my bike, several times a day.

It was after I’d been at the park a couple days, went ahead and ordered that new toilet I wanted. Mine had a factory defect in the porcelain inside the toilet bowl, usually covered by water but visible and obvious. It would discolor very quickly. Didn’t care for the look of it. And the flush valve would spritz water on my leg all the time. Kind of annoying. I added up things that I should do for maintenance on it noting it’s 17 years old and just decided to go ahead and buy a new one and be done with it. The same model was still available so didn’t have to dig out all the measurements. It arrived in 2 days from Amazon, installed it, and now have a nice new porcelain RV toilet. All shiny. No spritzing water on my leg any more. Much quieter when flushing too. The park owner was back by this time and wouldn’t let me drop the old one into the park’s dumpster so had to drive it out to the dump in the back seat of my car. No dumping charge though since it’s considered construction material. It’s a land fill and it makes me chuckle to think that my toilet will someday support the land a million dollar home is on.

That’s it for this issue, next time we’ll go to court!

Thanks for reading.