Reno: Day Five

We decided to go to Pyramid Lake and take a look around. Pyramid Lake is north of Reno and by a quirk of fate, so is Sonic. Yes, we had breakfast at Sonic again. It’s a pretty short drive to the lake through hilly scrub. I’m not sure who the travel site is talking about, but I can’t quite imagine anyone not being able to hold it together for half an hour through any terrain other than arctic in a car and on smooth roads. As we admired the view at our first photo op, we met a couple from out east and chatted a little. Then we went to see the fish hatchery.

I’m sure a lot of you are yawning already, but I rather like fish and staying in tune with wildlife, so it was enough to keep my interest for the 30–45 minutes we spent there. As we got out of the car, the couple we had met was just pulling into the parking lot. We figured it would be like that all day, pulling into the same parking lots just minutes apart. We were wrong.

Trying to get closer to the lake, we took a route that appeared to ring it on the east (going from south to north). It’s a long, two-lane road and there was construction on it. You know how in populated areas they just have flaggers, or if the construction is going to last for a long period they put in a temporary stoplight? On this road, they had flaggers and a pilot car. Yep. The flagger stops you and says the pilot car should be back in fifteen minutes or so. So you wait for a pilot to lead you at a safe speed through several miles of nothing punctuated by enormous trucks and the activity of laying a new lane of asphalt.

After a while we were certain we’d gone far enough to pass the lake without having caught sight of it, so we turned back. And we came to the construction just in time to meet the pilot car with no wait! When we came to a little town, we decided to try and take some back roads and see if we could get closer to the lake on roads that aren’t on the map. The road quickly became dirt with not too much vegetation, but the hills were just high enough that we couldn’t quite see the lake. “Just a few more minutes, I’m sure,” we kept saying to one another. Then it started to rain and we met a few local kids on bicycles hightailing it out of there. Yeh. A Corolla in mud on uncharted roads. Hmmm. Keep going, or turn back? “Just a few minutes more, I’m sure!” After about half an hour of that, our luck still didn’t change and we never did get us to see the lake close-up. Even though we never got to the east side of the lake, we were very lucky in one respect: the storm that brought those rare Reno raindrops with it turned into a tornado shortly after it passed over the lake, yet we were blissfully unaware of the twister until we heard about it on the news.

We decided we really should eat somewhere other than at Sonic, so we looked up some restaurants and decided on a Chinese buffet. King Chinese buffet. It was fabulous! Sure, it had all the same stuff you find in any super buffet, but the food was not greasy at all—a common failing of Chinese buffet-only restaurants in my experience. The seafood selection was quite wonderful and I had perhaps a few mussels too many.