It’s an adventure just getting to Nevada’s Black Rock Desert http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Rock_Desert. First, you pass through the incongruous and charming hamlet of Gerlach (don’t blink), then there’s Guru Road just out of town on your left. Jutting off the main paved road, this dirt spur has become, over the years, a kind of impromptu sculpture and philosophy garden. The road is lined with boulders, stones and rock slabs chiseled with random bits of life advice and odes to beloved locals. Occasionally along the mile plus route there are larger pieces of more complex sculpture, like an abstract Elvis crafted from stacked rocks and adorned with a cape made by linking together hundreds of beer can bottoms—it bears an uncanny likeness.

The sign that greets you outside the lone store in Empire, a town just shy of Nevada’s remote Black Rock Desert, says it all.

One of our favorite sections of Guru Road is an area devoted to the Iron Butt Association http://www.ironbutt.com/about/about.cfm , a group of apparently insane long distance endurance motorcycle riders who do things like ride a motorcycle 11,000 miles in 11 days and ride from Canada to Mexico (or vice versa) within 36 hours. Yeah, our kind of people!

As we’re walking along the road we are tickled by a persistent playful wind that keeps making us feel like there’s someone behind us even though there’s no one in sight. The utterly dry but surprisingly refreshing wind persists as we travel on to the Black Rock Desert itself which (are you sitting down?) isn’t black at all! A close inspection reveals a sprinkling of small black pebbles on top of the powder-fine taupe dust but the overall effect is a desert that looks (and feels) like the spongy pale top of a par-baked biscuit.

The dusty, artsy turn off for Guru Road, on our way to the Black Rock Desert off in the distance.

It’s gorgeous here, but there’s not a lot to do so after exploring the desert around us we get down to work. Eric just got a new computer from Dell http://www.dell.com/content/products/category.aspx/notebooks?c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19 (Eric has an XPS and Karen uses an ATG) which needs to be set up and Karen always has something she’s supposed to be writing (including this blog post), so right in the remote Black Rock Desert we end up with both computers going, thanks to our generator, in one of the most scenic offices we’ve ever worked in.

No need to worry if your site is a pull-through or not here in the Black Rock Desert where room to turn around is never an issue.

Every time we begin to think we’re totally alone out here, we hear the rumble and see the dust of another vehicle approaching in the distance—usually going around 100 mph. Once we’re even buzzed by a low-flying plane (we think the pilot just wanted a closer look at our Airstream). Still, it’s hard to imagine this place packed with the 30,000+ folks who gather here every year over Labor Day for the annual Burning Man Festival http://www.burningman.com/.

Forget cubicles! Hard at work on our hardcore Dell laptops in our impromptu desert office.

Sunset turns us into long, happy shadows after another great day of camping on the Black Rock Desert.