1983/04 Yosemite trip - Reno |
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Reno |
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[My trip was in April 1983, but this account was written mostly on a rainy afternoon in 2011, when I thought it was worth capturing some of the stories from what was a very eventful week.]
It was a Sunday at the end of April 1983 and I was flying out to Reno, Nevada for a customer conference. I was giving a couple of presentations, but I had no appointments with customers so I was hoping to get out and about in the area when there nothing going on that interested me. I was planning to spend the following weekend in neighbouring California, and I’d reserved a frame tent and bunk for two nights in Yosemite national park.
This was the first warm weekend of the year in Minnesota and both days were really nice, in the mid 70s. When I arrived at the airport I was surprised to find that I knew most 
of the passengers on the flight! We were supposed to limit the number of employees on a single flight but this was back in the days when we could make our own bookings so the rule wasn’t easy to enforce. The other surprise was their clothing, tee shirts and shorts for many people. This was a decade before the days of the Web, but I’d gone to the library to check out the climate in Reno, and didn’t think I’d be wearing shorts there. The area around Vegas would be OK for shorts in April but Reno is in the north of the state and is at 5000ft, about the same as Denver, so it was likely to be cool. Sure enough, as we descended over Nevada the lady sitting next to me commented on the salt in the furrows in the fields, and she was horrified to hear that the salt might really be snow.
Reno itself lacks charm, but the area around it is scenic and interesting with its historic mining districts. I enjoyed my week. I was staying at the MGM Grand, a massive block of a building that 
included the conference and meeting rooms as well as the inevitable acres of casino. The décor looked vaguely pre-revolution French updated with plastic gilt. The phrase that came to mind was “tacky in the grand manner”. I had rented a car, ostensibly to get out to eat during the week, but also as a way of escaping in mid-afternoon and exploring the sights. My colleagues joked that most of the cars rented would do the ten miles to the hotel and back and never move for the rest of the week. Not mine!
On my first afternoon I made it to Harrah’s car museum in Reno, with its rows of restored cars, mostly American of course. It was certainly interesting but the presentation of the cars was unimaginative. There were a couple of Morgan three-wheelers and a few motorcycles, including an Ariel Square Four. [Most of Harrah's collection is now well presented in the National Automobile Museum, also in Reno.]
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Harrah's Museum |
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It snowed at least a little bit every day so it definitely wasn’t shorts weather, but I got out to Virginia City in the mountains to the east of Reno, site of the famous Comstock Lode silver mine. Virginia City today looks much like it did a hundred years ago, but it’s now a tourist town, a place to drink and gamble while wearing cowboy clothes.
On the southwest side of Reno, high in the mountains is Lake Tahoe, which looked really pretty with the snowcapped mountains behind it. Clouds descended over the lake before I could capture the big picture. This photo was taken in a marshy inlet, well away from the lake’s cities. South Tahoe is in Nevada and allows gambling while Tahoe City next door is in California and does not. The first casino coming into South Tahoe from California is built right on the state line. On the other side 
of the lake is the film set for the Ponderosa Ranch, home to the Cartwright family and the Bonanza TV series, a lot further from Virginia City in reality than it was in fiction. I was tempted to take a look, but the road to the ranch was snowed in, as was the road from Tahoe down the mountain into the rest of California.
Despite all the touristing I actually managed to get some work done too, so it had been a good week.