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RAS - rien à signaler, as French puts it. It's what the blackboard man writes during the Tour de France when he has no information to give the riders.

And that's how it's been today. Nothing to signal. Just a simple day to get us to the forest campground on the outskirts of Dayton, a camping site that charges an extraordinary amount for little more than a patch of dust amid the scrub. Oh, and a path to the "comfort station", as the small wooden sign puts it.

"But watch out if you walk along it," the ranger hissed between his two well-separated teeth. "This is Nevada and it's mid-summer. Be careful where you put your feet: we have rattlesnakes here."

I'll write agan tomorrow if I survive the night.

Oh, and they used to have camels here. I'm not the first to notice the sand, it seems. In the 1850s, the army thought camels were the thing of the future, good for galloping about and pretty light on water and able to cart about supplies in the American desert. Sadly, they didn't work out. Even more sadly, locals bought them here in Dayton and worked them for a decade, hauling wood before, as the park guide says, "they were abandoned to fend for themselves; few were seen after the 1880s."