Upon leaving the Sportman’s River Retreat, a guy came up to me, while I was disconnecting, and started to ask my honest opinion of the park. I gave him my two-cents worth. It turned out that he and his wife were the ones contemplating purchasing the resort. I then gave him my ideas of what the park could be with some TLC and a lot of money. We gave them our card and asked them to let us know if they ended up buying the place.
Fearing heavy smoke (because that’s what we heard) we headed down into Sparks, NV. On the trek down we crossed into California and had to stop at the border crossing. I mean really – aren’t we all American states? They asked us if we had any fresh fruit or firewood. We stated no and then got approval to travel in the great state of California. We noticed diesel prices above $4.50 a gallon. Good thing that we had enough diesel to make it to Nevada!
The place we stayed in was the Sparks Marina RV Resort. After hooking up we notice that a tree was blocking our satellite so we moved two sites down and after rehooking up, we had TV. Yay!
The RV Resort is nice but the sites are somewhat small.
Here’s pictures of the park:
The next day we headed to see the famous Reno Arch on what I think was the “strip”.
We are definitely not in Las Vegas! The main area for casinos were deserted and we didn’t like leaving the truck parked along side the sketchy street. A bit scary.
Talk about scary – check out this climbing wall:
Katrina and I thought about doing it for a second and then that desire passed.
We went to the Wild River Restaurant for an early dinner located along the Truckee river walk. Nice location. Not many people there yet. We got to sit outside under the umbrellas until it started to rain and then we ran inside to finish our meal.
The food was ok. I didn’t write home about it though. While we were waiting we looked at things to do in Reno and saw that they had a comedy club. Sounded like fun and it was only $25! We needed to run home and let Bear out before the show. Once we got home we decided that we would just stay in because we had an early morning planned the next day.
3:00am! That’s way too early to get up! We decided that we wanted to see the Reno Balloon Race and parking opened up at 3:30am. We rolled into the parking area just after 4:00. It took us some time to walk from the grassy parking area to the viewing area where there were vendors set up with coffee and breakfast food. We found a nice grass area against the fence to set up our blanket. We were excited to see the “glow blow” at 5:00am. and the balloon launches at 7:00am. An announcement came across the air stating that it was too windy for the glow blow, but that they were still hoping to launch the balloons. At about 5:40am it started to lightening and rain. Another announcement that they event was canceled but please come back tomorrow as the weather looks to be cooperative. Really, another 3:00am? I don’t think so! We walked back to the truck in a drizzle and headed back to the coach to get some sleep.
We’re not that good of morning people!
After some sleep and relaxation, we headed out for an early dinner in midtown. Midtown seems like an up and coming neighborhood. We decided on Arario, a Korean fusion restaurant:
Really good food! We ordered the Ahi Tuna Bowl and the Bibimbap:
Seems like we found a dish that we really like at Korean restaurants.
We walked around Midtown and checked out the scene. Neat restaurant areas and bars.
We decided that we should go back to the Truckee Riverwalk area and get pictures of some artwork there:
The “Believe” sign and the stained glass fish were located in the City Plaza along the Truckee river. Some of the panels of the stained glass fish were broken out. The plaza had been taken over by skate boarders and homeless people. As we were taking the first picture of the fish, a female skateboarder stood in the background and flipped us off. Classy!
All in all I would not recommend spending any time in Reno. Dirty, rundown and seemingly abandoned. We truly didn’t feel welcomed and without tourists in the “biggest little town in the world” I don’t see a comeback anytime soon.
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