Ely | Cooking With Fire

We’d been on the road for nine or so hours, daylight was gradually turning into twilight, and we were only 18 miles west of Ely, Nevada, our end destination for the day. Out of nowhere on the passenger side of the car bounded a large deer, hitting us in the centre of the grill, bouncing on the hood, then catapulting off the driver’s side roof into the ditch on the far side of the road. In the flash of a second, everything changed, as do so many occurrences in life.

We gradually rolled to a stop and off the road as much as we could with steam and smoke spewing out from under the hood and parts dropping on the highway behind us. The deer was quite dead we were sure, and we were so fortunate to not have been injured. We were both belted in, our air bags did NOT deploy (thank heavens), and the deer did NOT come through the windshield or the convertible top as he easily could have. All in all, we were very fortunate.

Our beautiful little car, however, didn’t fair so well. This little white 1999 BMW 3 Series convertible is Ron’s baby – just brought down last fall from a four year vacation in California. We’d just done a bunch of work on it, including work on the stereo system, and we were enjoying listening to some great music and, at the time of the accident, a superb audio book: The Boys in the Boat.

Our Poor BMW

A passing local motorist stopped to ensure we weren’t injured and called the Highway Patrol for us. I was able to reach AAA and get a tow truck out to get us to take us back into Motel 6 in Ely. We talked about the various alternatives with the tow truck driver, John, and learned that Ely had no transportation services or car rental available. Our only option, he suggested, was to rent a U-Haul to get us to the next larger centre to pick up a car rental. Ely really is in the middle of nowhere.

We needed to get to New York within the week, so Ron got creative. He went down to the local Chrysler/Jeep dealership the next morning and did some fast negotiation on a 2006 Jeep Liberty. When he pulled up to the motel, I had to laugh because the spare tire cover on the back reads “Life is Good”. It really is. One more white vehicle to add to our fleet (we have two other white cars as well)!

Our insurance company and the towing company made arrangements to have the BMW hauled and repaired in Elko, NV. We have no idea how we’ll get it, but I’m sure we can figure something out by the time the car is ready. We don’t plan to come back west until late October or early November, but I’m sure everything will work out as it always does. Life really is good.

When Ron and I left Santa Fe, we drove though southern Colorado to reach Moab, Utah for the night. We wanted to get an early start so that we could explore as much of Utah’s National Parks and natural beauty as possible before heading on to Nevada and ultimately California. Stretch and Mary had warned us that there were some bad storms in the area and we here a bit concerned about how the roads would be along the way.

When we checked in to our motel for the night, we knew that we were in the right place. On the wall was a picture entitled “Fire and Ice”, which of course was the title of my first cookbook. I treat coincidences and synchronicity like this as an inspired message to confirm that I’m on the right path. My Mom thinks that I should write a book on the many situations like this that have and continue to happen in my life. Maybe I’ll just write about it here instead.

To beat the storms, we decided that we needed to get to California and over the tallest passes as quickly as possible, so only took a brief tour through Arches National Park. The formations and color of the rock in this area are truly spectacular – we were awed and amazed!

We hurried on to stay ahead of the weather and quickly passed through Ely, Nevada where we’d stopped at so many times before on our way east or west. We just nicely got about twenty miles west of Ely and it started to snow. Ron’s not used to driving in snow and neither is the BMW, but I didn’t think it was anything to be concerned with initially (being an optimistic Canadian who has always dealt with snow). We continued west and within fifteen more miles, the snow became a whiteout and we definitely decided to head back to Ely for the night.

We drove through Alpine, Nevada and had breakfast at one of our favorite little diners the next day. They’d endured storms all the day and night before and had a serious amount of snow to contend with – about eighteen inches. We were so glad that we’d headed back to Ely the night before – we never would have made it over the high summits.

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Moab, Utah and Ely, Nevada