Reno Trip: the Summary

We took a week off, from Thursday the 17th through last Wednesday, and went to Reno for a reunion of any who served on the USS Sculpin, SSN-590, a Skipjack class nuclear fast-attack submarine. The reunion opened Thursday for registration and camaraderie in a hospitality suite that was open through Sunday at two in the morning. On Friday, the reunion group had a bus tour that went to Virginia City and Carson City and included two short train rides and, of course, more camaraderie. Friday night and Saturday day were open for…you guessed it! More camaraderie. The reunion banquet was held on Saturday night, with several guests adjourning afterwards to the hospitality suite for, well, camaraderie, I guess you’d call it. I probably should mention that “camaraderie” in this context means “a bounty of embellished sailing stories, choruses of belly laughs, and copious amounts of liquid refreshment.” The hospitality suite had a seemingly endless supply of said refreshment, both hard and soft. Personally, I think I drank more alcohol that week than I would in an average six-month period. So, if you know me, you know that that means I had something like two beers and two mixed drinks, one each on four separate days. Oh, and I almost forgot: half a glass of wine with Friday’s dinner. Yeh, I prefer a clear head.

On Sunday we rested. On Monday and Tuesday we did some sightseeing, putting several hundred miles on the little rental car. Did you know that a Toyota Corolla is considered, at least by Hertz, to be a mid-sized car? Yeh. We reserved a mid-size and that’s what they gave us. Well, it was a car, and it got us around. We had booked a helicopter flight over Emerald Bay on Lake Tahoe for Tuesday. On Monday the tour company called us to say that the trip would be postponed from its original departure time of 11:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. because the chopper was in for maintenance and would not be back until early afternoon. On that early afternoon, as we were driving south of the lake, we got another call, this time saying that the flight would have to be cancelled, as the whirlybird was not yet back from maintenance. It worked out all right, though, because it gave us more time to walk around and enjoy the beauty that is Lake Tahoe and its surrounding mountainscape.

I do not recommend Circus Circus of Reno. I traveled for business in the ‘80s and stayed in a lot of mid-rate hotels (Holiday Inn, Ramada, etc.). Circus Circus is a mid-rate hotel, or less, of the ‘80s: little formulaic square box of a room with only one chair; charges for local phone calls; no free wi-fi (at $9.95 for twenty-four hours, it’s one of the “additional amenities available for a small fee”); and even short sheets! On the positive side, the room was very clean, and when the cleaning staff observed that we were coffee drinkers (based on the king-sized stryo cups we left in the room right next to the four-pack of Frappuccinos and assorted caffeine-laden soft drinks), they left five one-cup packs in the room instead of the prescribed two.

We gambled a little: slots; no table games. I had a few good wins and some long, drawn out losses and ended up losing about thirty dollars overall, so it really was pretty cheap entertainment.
I have some notes as to what we did each day, so more detail is coming in later entries.