Naming yourself an oxymoron is a cute way to generate a catchphrase. It happens to work a lot better for an actual cute game than a has-been gambling town.
Sui and I happened upon the latter sometime last week (and we beat the former this week) when we went back to the snowy slopes to make another run at winter sporting. We both started anew with snowboarding last year, and this year Sui wanted give skiing a chance (1).
She pretty much gave up after 2 hours of floundering with four waxy, slippery snow sticks.
Satisfied with our acknowledgment of the mountains this year, we retreated to a warmer locale in Reno, Nevada. The “Biggest Little City” was the home of Tahoe and gambling getaways, but the latter has been increasingly subdued by the presence of local Indian casinos; specifically, places like Cache Creek and Thunder Valley in the Californian Central Valley region are usurping Reno as the convenient location to piss one’s paychecks away.
To make things slightly more complicated, my mom and grandparents tagged along, eager to watch some Chinese concert held in one of the casino performance halls. These performances were probably the only thing keeping the town relevant.
The town is seriously crappier than I remember from the few pitstops we’ve had on road trips. While my family was off enjoying their rare concert, Sui and I exhausted the entertainment options in Reno within an hour of our mediocre dinner buffet. Beyond the casino floor and the hotel rooms, there was absolutely nothing to do in Reno – no shows, amusement parks, zoos, exhibits, museums, malls, or attractions were open during the winter or after 7 p.m., and even if we were the type to frequent clubs (strip or otherwise), they looked lame to Vegas or SF venues. Of the shoppes open during the day, most were scattered across or outside the town, and of course public transportation was non-existent.
Still, its cheap concert halls and promixity to world-class ski resorts will mean Reno will not be properly euthanized for decades to come; it’ll just have to keep happy with its “pitstop” status.
- as it turned out, my previous skiing experience in Canada came in handy, though having repeatedly taken the same “beginner” classes with other skiing newbies, all I can manage is to stop a blazing 10 mph run (↩)