Another visit to our Pioche House

Here is our 'lovely' house in Pioche as we pulled up to it at almost midnight. 

We're both surprised that solar light is holding up. It's always on at night on a dim setting but as soon as it sees movement, it gets brighter.

Heres the front yard, growing a good bunch of tumbleweeds, there were about 50 bajillion of the dang things around the house. Lan said he's just spray them, but I wanted them gone as they are a terrible fire hazard. 

So, I pulled them by hand. 

We took at least 4 truckloads of them to the dump and that wasn't even all of them. I pulled them for a couple hours at least every other day, my hands were so sore.

Lan did work on the basement, installed LED lights, we got it cleaned up, he moved the freshwater line from the right side of this area to the left, attached some of the new PEX lines to it and has a distribution board set up and attached to the wall. We'll need a new water heater soon, even if we can't use it yet.

This is the old water heater and the pipes under the kitchen area of the house. This stuff is all going to be removed eventually.

This is going from the 'finished' part of the basement to the stairs that go to the house. The bright spots and open to the outside, so vermints can get in.

Since we're now making a truck payment, we don't have tons of cash to throw at this house, so we had plenty of time to explore. This was Condo or Condor Valley and it did not disappoint!

Brian Head in Utah was gorgeous with the fall colors.

I love Aspen trees

Another day we were trying to get back home before the storm came in but got a flat. Rain ended up getting us pretty wet.

This is inside the Jackrabbit Tunnel, last time we were there we only went to this deck area, we didn't go down the ladder. Down here there are SO MANY cool places to go.

Next time we plan on going much, much farther down that ladder, it goes about 50 feet farther before we couldn't see it anymore.

This isn't the best photo but here is a male tarantula I almost stepped on when I was entering a mine. I ended up screaming like a little girl and didn't go into that mine.

As we were getting packed up to come home, this happened. To the brand new truck, didn't even have 7600 miles on it yet. It was an accident.

Before we were 100 miles away from Pioche, Mora had found another tailgate for sale in Portland, Oregon so we went there on the way home & bought it for $300.  It's also from a brand new 2025 truck so matched perfectly.

Heres the leaving Pioche photo. I hope someday I'll have the opportunity to stay longer & not have a set date to leave.

 

Fabulous Pioche Trip

 We did SO MUCH STUFF on our recent trip to Pioche that I'm going to do this in parts.

First I'll cover the trip, then on future updates, I'll fill you in on each thing we did.

We left home i n Port Orchard on Friday, April 25, 2025 in our Dodge 3500 dually pulling the 23' travel trailer. We headed south, not knowing for sure what route we'd take but we knew we needed to end up in Winnemucca for the Gypsy Horse Fest. It was pretty cool to see a bunch of Gypsy's all in one place, all looking fabulous, but I sincerely thought there would be many more. I also think Ambleside would do really well there because shes got such nice movement compared to some of these horses. Judges asked for extended trot and all they did was speed up a bit while Amble puts on a show all her own.

They were fun to watch but we stayed only about an hour because we had time to make up since we'd had a blow out on the trailer and had to spend time changing it and going 60 moles out of our way to buy a new spare. Plus going to Winnemucca added about 500 miles onto our trip.

We did see wild horses this trip but I got no photos of them.  There were 2 mares near one mine, 3 more not too far out of town and a LOT in the Steens Mountains of Oregon.

We went on Highway 50 again, known as the 'Loneliest road in America' and this time it truly was, there were times we'd drive an hour & only pass 1 car.

We boondocked overnight just west of Austin and it began to snow early in the morning. Not heavy, not unexpected but it weas 12 hours earlier than they said. We had a few mountain passes to go over and they were in the clouds.

Somewhere along the way we passed the 'Shoe Tree' and had to stop for photos. We'd seen one of our youtube channels stopping there so we did too, next time we'll each have a pair of shoes to add to the tree.

It was kinda gross seeing all those shoes.

Finally, we reached Pioche and got the trailer parked. It will be out place to stay whenever we go down there, a place to sleep, pee, cook and have A/C or heat if needed.

This was the first photo of the house, I always like to get one. It looks like a meth house with the reflective car window things in the windows.

Lan finished his Lego Mustang car model Andrea gave him for Christmas.

On our first morning I enjoyed the sunrise through the Lilacs. They are all over town and the whole place smells devine.

We got to see friends, this is Jon, he's one reason we bought in Pioche. He is 85, a grieving widower and inventor.

And this is Maynard who lives across the street but is now our Pioche pup.

We replaced this window

with this one.

Lan built this wall, reinforcing the wall that's an exterior wall but the kitchen is on the other side now.

He added 2 walls to form the bedroom. If you look closely you'll notice the spot we saved for the fridge so we can have the classic triangle of sink-stove-fridge. 

More on walls later.

We also went into a few mines on our trip, more on those later.

We tried to take a hike somewhere every day, on this day we hiked around town then up to the Cross on top of the hill.

Here Lan is pointing to our house.

We also had to shower but not i n the teensy trailer bathroom so we'd go out to Cathedral Gorge state park and hike around and go into the slot canyons, then use the facilities there.  That is one place we definitely want to take Soren.

I'll skil to coming home. We left Thursday afternoon, May 8th and drove all the way to Jackpot, right at the border of Idaho. Stayed at Cactus Jacks hotel. Left at 9am after a yummy breakfast in their buffet.

We drove to Twin Falls and watched Base Jumpers jump off this bridge, the only place its legal in the USA. Way fun.

Then as the day got hotter I started bitching about no a/c in the truck.  We stopped in Mountain Home at the McDonalds for lunch and started staring at the new ford trucks.

And we bought this one:

Its in our backyard now, they let us drive it away without us paying a dime. We left the old truck there and felt a teensy bit bad because it took us a LOT of places but it never had A/C and I'm getting too old for that bullshit.

2025 F-350 4 door, 4x4, diesel with 20 miles on it.