Alright so it was less rambling and more gambling but I
felt as if before we even got to Reno; before I’d finished booking a room, that
I’d gambled and been snookered by our hotel/casino – The Peppermill. The Tuesday and Wednesday before the 4th
of July were advertised at $59 and $69 respectively. A good deal I announced to the wife and she
said, “Book it,” and so I clicked BOOK IT.
The next page showed me that my grand total was over $180. What the hell? And there was the $15 dollar per day
compulsory resort fee telling me that if I wanted to use wi-fi, the fitness
center and pool, have a bed and get toilet paper in my room I would have to
pony up. Okay the last was an
exaggeration but if the fee is compulsory why not put it up front in the cost
of the room? Oh but I know the answer to
that question. Because at first blush
$59 looks a lot more inviting than $74 and so you rush to click the BOOK IT
icon before anyone else gets YOUR room.
And now you’re at the page where it’s time to pay up and excitement has
taken charge and you say “screw it” and you tap in your credit card number. Oh I had second thoughts but in the end I
reasoned that, hell its only 30 bucks. Of
course that’s how things get expensive.
You keep tacking on the “its onlys” until you've racked up the national
debt – it’s the American way. And so before
even leaving the house it was Peppermill -1, American Boomer – 0.
Reno is a straight shot from the Bay Area. Four hours, eastbound on 80 across what can
be a searing Sacramento Valley over the Sierra’s, past Donner Summit that was frigid
when the ill-fated pioneer party for which it’s named wintered there in
1846. From the summit you drop down into
the high desert of Reno. Just outside
the Bay Area the billboards entice you with visions of pretty people, in the rapture
of their new found wealth that flowed from what are touted as the “loosest slots in Nevada.” Actually the loosest slots are a few miles
east of Reno at the Mustang Ranch and other such enterprises but we’ll save
that for another blog. When I was a kid
Reno had the market cornered on casino come on billboards. Now they compete with the Indian casinos
dotting California.
Apparent signs of the paranoid times are evidenced by the
billboards that appear along the way that hawk ammunition. A place called Jack Ross Ammunition promotes
its reload ammunition and invites visitors to tour their factory store in a string
of billboards that start popping up around Sacramento. Mr. Ross has incorporated as his logo the revolutionary Don’t Tread on Me logo coiled serpent. The
revolution’s a comin’ folks. Ross was
only one of a fair amount of bullet emporiums along the way bearing bold
oversized AMMO signs. They’re a comin’
fer your guns. I’m waiting for the day
when I can walk into the poker room in Reno and see a latter day Doc. Holliday sitting at
the table complete with pearl handled 44s.
At that point I guess I can say we've come full circle. Full circle from what?
When I was a kid and we drove through Reno it appeared
suddenly as a clump in the desert. If
there wasn't any traffic on Virginia Street, which at the time was highway 80,
we’d be through in a matter of minutes. Now
you come on to the outskirts of Reno just shortly after you've dropped out of
the Sierra Nevada, onto the Great Basin; and it lasts for a while - it sprawls a bit.
There are suburban neighborhoods sunk between rolling hills and an
occasional mansion perched on top of a baked, brown hill. Reno was a haven for Californians looking for
more house for the money. The wife tells
me about a family she knows that lived in the Bay Area and decided to move to
Reno. The moving boxes hadn't been
emptied before the three teenaged kids decided they hated the Biggest Little
City, regressed into their shells and begged to return to the Bay Area. Inexplicably dad made the move and kept his
job in Fremont California, nearly 250 miles away. That’s a rough commute and it apparently wore
on his health – what a surprise. I
suppose they looked into going back but like so many Cali pioneers before them they
were stuck. You leave the Bay Area for a
cheaper McMansion and you you've priced yourself out of the Bay Area. The wife says they’re still in Reno.
This isn't a knock on Reno. Hell it could be anywhere that you think that
the grass is greener, the sands cleaner, the ocean bluer and the living
easier. Anywhere at all; Reno, Las
Vegas, the Alaskan wilderness, or the Central American coast. The wife, who apparently knows a lot of
people, tells me of families she knows that pulled up stakes and moved to Vegas
– and they don’t gamble. Just wanted a
big ole house. And now they find
themselves bored. And so every morning
they wake up in a place where THE activity is gambling, and it’s in the middle
of a fucking desert and they don’t know what to do with themselves. Go out and hunt rattlers I guess. You buy a place in Central America and you
love that everything is so green and then you discover that all of that green is
because it rains a hell of a lot more than you bargained for and you didn't do
enough homework to realize that moving to Central America isn't like everything
you had in America only with a beach and coconut trees. And so the folks that moved to Reno found
that the greener grass turned to some scrawny pines and sagebrush on a rocky
plot.
Reno and Las Vegas always seemed weird to me. Without all of the gambling, what would each of them be except just another town in the desert? I liked Reno for one thing, the great Harrah's auto collection. It included some firearms and a Ford Tri-Motor airplane but it was known primarily for the stunning collection of automobiles. By the way, I like that sly line about the loosest slots at the Mustang Ranch.
ReplyDeleteDuring my childhood, occasionally mom and dad and I would go to Reno for the day. It always started at some hour before dawn, which wasn't bad because that meant breakfast at the Milk Farm just off Highway 80. Their breakfast platters and the pancakes were great.
Aside from that, Reno isn't a hugely wonderful place for a kid to be. As I became an adult and worked my way up to codger-hood, going somewhere to gamble held zero interest for me. When I worked in Social Services, I had colleagues who with their spouses would regularly go to Laughlin. I had never heard of the place until then. Gambling just doesn't interest me.
That guy with the commute from Reno to Fremont reminded me of a colleague a few years ago. She and her husband bought a home in the Sacramento area because it was much more affordable than the S.F. Bay Area. She worked in South San Francisco and he worked in Silicon Valley. Every day M-F they did that horrid commute. How can anyone enjoy their home when they spend almost all the time away from it? Unfortunately, they're far from alone in not being able to afford to buy a home in the Bay Area that is reasonably worth its inflated price.