My Week in Reno

The first thing I want to say is "Hallelujah!" The plane seats had more leg room than I've experienced in many years. The last time we flew cross country was five years ago. We paid for seats with extra leg room and my knees were still brushing against the seat in front of me--and the only people who think I'm tall are four years old. I was thrilled that not only could I move my legs around enough so that nothing cramped, but I could stand up without levitating over the armrest. It was a great start.

It was a very long day of travel, so I was barely noticing my surroundings on the drive from the airport to our hotel, until we passed a gas station. The week before we left, the price of gas at home had gone from $3.25 to $3.35. The ten cent jump was a jolt. But at the station next to our hotel, the price of gas was $4.25. That got my attention.

Then in a tourist area about forty minutes from Reno, the gas was--are you sitting down?--$5.25.  Good Grief!

This was my first trip to this part of the country and I couldn't get over how different the landscape was. I've seen mountains up and down the east coast and in Europe, but these were completely different. They were brown dirt and rocks and steeper than I'm used to. Apparently in the spring, when there's rain and more moderate temperatures, shrubs and flowers abound. But right now, in mid-summer it was hot, hot, hot and dry, dry, dry.

True, it was dry heat--someone always points that out--but when it's 97º and feeling lie 106°, it's still ghastly. At least to some of us. There were more than a few people biking and jogging while I was busy trying to find something cool enough to inhale.

The friend we were visiting kept reminding me that when I was feeling tired it was because I wasn't used to operating at five thousand feet. I'm pretty sure it was jetlag, but it was sweet of her to try.

We took a day trip to the Donner Pass Museum, a small but thorough recounting of that awful event, as well as the growth of highways and motor cabins, and the ease of travel once the automobile was available to many.

To get there, we traveled further up in the mountains. As we drove, the brown hills developed some scrub brush, then a few evergreens, then a lot of evergreens, until we were in a forest. The sky was a gorgeous shade of blue that I don't know how to describe and had never seen before.

We were fortunate that we got there that day, because when we woke up the next morning all the mountains were hidden behind a curtain of grey smoke and ash from the California wildfires. We met another couple who were on the fifteenth floor of a hotel in downtown Reno (we were right outside Reno proper). They said when they got up that morning and looked out the window, they couldn't see the ground. It's eerie.

And this is getting to be longer than I'd expected so I will finish next week. Bye!