Greetings from the luxurious Minden Best Western!

I landed in Reno last night having made my flight with about five minutes to spare. Then I wrangled mightily with the Hertz folks to get a car with an iPod jack -- oddly, I've found, the desk clerks never have any idea whether their cars have them and they usually do. I ended up with a Chevy Cobalt which is a cute little glorified golf cart that does the trick. I've been getting them a lot lately and, while they don't meet the standards of my car-nut partner, all I really care about these days is that auxiliary jack!

All I know about Minden thus far is that US 395 is well-signed with indications of where it is and, at 11 pm, the only things open are a McD's and an AM/PM. And that is likely to be all I find out. Not looking good for finding a Starbucks around here.

There are two versions of my Fossett work from yesterday available, one here for Wired News and the other is here for the New York Times. They're not terribly different except that Wired did let me deal with the flowering conspiracy theory issue involved. I just watched CNN's report from the Minden Air Field and they had nothing new to report today. But the Associated Press' excellent Northern Nevada correspondent Brendan Riley had this terrific backgrounder on what the Flying M Ranch is.

Mark my words, and I've been saying this since the beginning: The Steve Fossett disappearance will eternally be fodder for conspiracy theorists. And you know why? Because this is Nevada!

Stay tuned -- I hope to update throughout the day here and post some pix when I can. Now would be a really good time for me to have one of those air-card things, huh? But thankfully, the Best Western has free and reliable Wi-Fi and is only about 4 mins from the air field.

OK - gotta go get my complimentary breakfast!