Message posted by Bob M on September 27, 2002 at 15:59:23 PST:

Probably considered the best drummer in modern rock visited Rachel on October 10 1998. He writes in the book "Ghost Rider"...

I couldn't resist stopping for breakfast in Rachel, Nevada, a tiny cluster of prefab buildings and mobile homes on the "Extraterrestrial Highway." Rachel announced itself by a sign reading, "America's UFO Capital: Alien's Welcome," and the souvenir stand in the restraunt was filled with such related merchandising as alien-shaped guitar picks and UFO bumper stickers and coffee mugs. Rachel's proximity to the Nellis Air Force Range (including the legendary, perhaps mythical, ?Area 51") and the Nevada Test Site attracted a certain fme based on reports of strange flying objects which might have been "reversed engineered" from captured space ships, such as the one allegedly collected at a crash site near Roswell, New Mexico. Whether or not you "want to believe," it's all interesting stuff.
Equally interesting to me was observing the kind of people such myths attracted. The wall of the restraunt, called the "Little Ale'Inn" (ouch), were lined with cartoons and slogans disparaging the government, the president and his wife, the Bureau of Land Management, gun control advocates, and anyone else seen to be interfering with western "freedom." (The so-called fierce independence of the ranchers of the western states toward the federal government, upon which they depend for subsidies and free rights to over-graze federal lands, has been described as, "Leave me alone, and give me more money.").....

In this book it descibes how he had visited Rachel a few years before this date while motorcycling from arena to arena during Rush's "Test for Echo" tour and had run out of gas near the "Five Mile Ranch" near Warm Springs and found some gas in a container, no one was around so they filled up the motorcycles and left a $20 bill with a note.

Neil Peart is the drummer for the band Rush and the book describes a 14 month 55,000 mile journey he took shortly after his 19 year old daughter and wife died within the same year.

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