Wednesday May 10th 2017

I got a slow start today. I spent all morning slowly drinking my coffee while catching up on my Internet reading and watching TV. It wasn’t until mid afternoon that I ventured out of the campground.

Without any specific destination I found myself wandering through the local neighborhoods on the northwest side of Reno. These are upscale neighborhoods with homes built in the last ten years. Some areas are gated communities and others are clustered around shopping. It is interesting to speculate on what it would be like to like in this area. The combination of the city of Reno and the nearby mountains provide a good combination of urban for culture and rural for recreation.

Route US 395 returning to Reno from northwest of town.

After passing through the neighborhoods I drove northwest on US 395 into California. This route pretty much keeps to the valleys on the east side of the Sierras from southern California north to Oregon and Washington. I expect it is a route I will use in a future year of travels to tour the Oregon and Washington areas. The scenery is pretty interesting. At this time of year the mountains still have snow at altitude and the slopes are green. As the snow melts the green will also turn brown creating a completely different visual palette.

Mountains to the west of US 395.

US 395 is a big enough entry into California that it has an agricultural inspection station. In California all vehicles need to go through the inspection. In other states with inspections it’s usually only trucks. Today the volume of traffic was low, so my car without a front license plate from a nearby state got selected for questioning. You could see the inspector’s mind work. He stared at my front bumper then looked down the road behind me. Since there were no other cars in sight he decided to talk to me. Once I said I didn’t have any plants or fruit on board I was allowed to continue, only five seconds of delay. I have passed through the inspection station on Interstate 80 a couple of times in the last week without any interrogation, but that was a busy road.

Pretty display at the Grand Sierra Resort, but are they real? I’m not sure, probably not.

When I returned to town I checked out another casino. This time I stopped at the Grand Sierra Resort Casino. It is large complex outside of the center of town on Interstate 580. Over the years it has been known as a Hilton, Bally’s and MGM resort. It has a big entertainment theater, but not as many slot machines as some of the other casinos in the area. Unfortunately, it had enough slots to take twenty bucks from me.

Two rafts in the Truckee River below the RV Resort.

Back at the RV resort I saw another interesting use for the Truckee River below the campground. Today, three adventurous folks were riding the rapids in rafts. Two people were in one traditional raft and one guy was in a pontoon raft. The traditional raft was fairing better than the pontoon craft. It was getting hung up on some of the hidden rocks. I didn’t see any disasters as they passed by, but I don’t know how far they had to go before their take out.