We made it to Nevada! You can’t get much different from Alaska than Nevada. Where Alaska is cool, lush, and green, Nevada is a hot, desolate desert. We’re loving it! We stayed in Carson City for a week. There’s not much to do in this area but we wanted to hit the Capitol City and a couple of other close-ish places.

The Nevada Capitol City Building is the smallest we’ve been in so far. In fact, I didn’t really take pictures of the inside. I snapped a couple pics of the marble floor that ran partially up the wall, but that’s really it. The outside of the building was more intriguing. We haven’t seen a Capitol Building made from sandstone. I did some digging and found out all of the sandstone for the building was obtained from the Nevada State Prison quarry.

The silver colored dome on top was also a unique touch. I liked walking around the grounds with its many trees and monuments, but I feel like it was lacking a little in the way it didn’t really feel like a Capitol Building. It felt more like a park with a pretty building that happened to be in it.

There were several casinos in the area, but for us…we were more interested in finding some good Mexican food! Something we’d been missing since we left the Missouri area.

Thanks to the internet, Jerl found two places he wanted to try. We stopped at El Paisano first.

The restaurant was small, everything was served on disposable plates, and the food was amazingly good!

And just like a true Mexican place, you had several choices for meat. Being the Foodies we are…it’s no great surprise our oldest got some of the…not so common meats. I believe he ended up with the pork stomach, beef head, and the beef tongue. He ate it all and went back for another taco.

The second place we tried was The Lady Tamales. Supposedly this place had the best tamales in town…how could we possibly pass that up?

This place did not disappoint. We all wolfed down our food and then got two dozen tamales to go. Yep, they really were that good!

This place not only had some of the best tamales we’ve ever had, it also had probably the best rice and beans. I would’ve gone back just for some more of the beans. Interestingly, neither of the places we ate at served chips and salsa the way we’re used to, but hey, when the food is that good…you don’t want to fill up on fluff before the main event.

We spent an afternoon in Reno to get some shopping done. New shoes and some groceries from the first Whole Foods we’d seen in months. We drove by the Reno Arch and The Strip on our way out of town.

We managed to fit in an afternoon at Lake Tahoe State Park! The little boys did the Junior Ranger program, but weren’t able to get a badge because all of the Rangers were at a wildfire that had popped up just that afternoon.

We walked around Sand Harbor.

Even in the late afternoon with a storm coming in, the water was beautiful.

We marveled at the big boulders sitting haphazardly all over the place.

We didn’t really get to spend as much time as we would have liked at Lake Tahoe, and someday, we plan on going back.

Carson City was a nice change for us. No overwhelming green…it never actually rained…and it was hot!

The boys even got to swim at the RV park pool!

See y’all down the road!