The best of all earthly drinks (Waiter, waiter, percolator)

Thanks, Enterprise Mfg Co

So, I like to focus my effort for maximum impact (this is my new way of saying 'lazy') and therefore although we have not one, but two, hand grinders, we usually just buy ground coffee. Since it's not espresso we're making, the ultimate freshness of just-ground beans doesn't seem to matter quite so much. Also, laz- I mean focus.

But I have at last seen the ultimate coffee mill, at the Beatty Museum. Machines of this type date to the 1870s - this one may be later, as Beatty didn't really take off til the early 1900s. It would probably have been used in a mercantile store, of course.

Probably will not work for camping. Guess we'll keep buying ground beans for now.

Our camp coffee pot has been mentioned in dispatches already. Made by the legendary (in Sweden, anyway) Berggren, maker of beautiful things, it's a vintage enamelled percolator with cheery coffee-based song lyrics - in Swedish - in gothic script around the sides. 

The verse is the first two lines of a coffee song ("Kaffevisan" - you have to love a language that has a
word just for songs about coffee.) 

"Kaffetåren den bästa är
av alla jordiska drycker"

Or "coffee is the best of all earthly drinks".

I bought it together with a kettle ("En vaktad kittel blir aldrig bränd" - a watched kettle will never burn - huh, it's about caution not about impatience :) and we use them for camping and other travelling, for a comforting brew-up or the essential morning fuel or heating dishwater or whatever.


Yeah coffee songs. I know "Java Jive", the Manhattan Transfer version. And? Think I could do with more, would give me something to sing under my breath while I watch the percolator perc away over the camp stove at 5 a.m. of a Sunday morning. They're out there, I just need to learn them.

I thought the Kaffevisan on my coffee pot might be beyond me - the first version I found struck me as kinda weird. But this one looks more doable although it may require all the cheerfulness of a Nevada morning sky as well as quite a lot of ... well ... coffee. 

Must go and make another pot now.

Meiklejohn Peak experience

Last year we stayed in Beatty on a trip to Death Valley and one of us spotted Meiklejohn Peak on a map or in a book. It's on the eastern side of Bare Mountain and is known for its large white butte (cue many stupid puerile jokes from me, along with remarkable restraint and some moderate and justifiable eye-rolling from others in the back seat of the rental car. You know who you are.)

In which we strike gold at Tonopah (Whitney's Bookshelf Used Book Store)

Oh a real, proper, second-hand bookshop. Feels like home just to walk in. The front window had already told us there was a wide and deep collection ... the owner greeted us warmly as we came in, and gave us the keys to the city - or, at least, showed us the filing system.

The Teen immediately vanished into the back reaches, while Simon and I browsed the local and mining books first. (I'm still looking out for those books on Pioche history!) I found Michael Moore's Medicinal Plants of the Desert and Canyon West, which had been on my list for a while. Score! 

Earth, bearing strange trees (The International Car Forest of the Last Church)

There is a huge art installation in the desert on the outskirts of Goldfield. Vehicles of several kinds have been arranged on or in the ground and painted in a variety of eclectic themes and motifs.

And that's all I can say in words. Nothing can really convey the heat or dust, the mountain-bike-park irregularity of the tracks, the arresting strangeness of the art itself, or the weird stillness of the air ...

Fairy tale kingdom - Bailey's Hot Springs

Three views of Bailey's Hot Springs from 95

Friday night we camped at Bailey's Hot Springs and thereby stumbled into a fairy tale. Of course we had brought our own castle with us. To have a moat, however, is a novelty.

Peacocks about to cross the moat, I mean stream. 

Our hostess directed us to a meadow by the spring-houses, where grasses and herbs are flowering. The spring water is piped to the top of this sward, falling with the constant sound of water into a narrow stream that arcs across to, and continues alongside, an otherwise perfectly ordinary gravel RV park. Once the tent was pitched, the stream curved around three sides of it - moat, check.