Wednesday, 6 April 2022
The RV repair guy had promised he'd be at my campsite at 9:00 but then called to say he'd be a half hour late. He was nearly 45 minutes late, but he got my old pump out and put a new pump in and explained things as he went along, which was nice. He took an hour to do the work and charged me for an hour and a half (apparently I had to pay for him being late), but because I was pleased with the results I didn't say a word about it. I now have a brand new water pump that has several features added to make it much quieter than my old one - a pad underneath and a special hose that deadens the sound and so forth. Now it's so quiet I worry it's not working right - but I'm sure I'll get used to it.
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| today's route |
I'd found online where the city's recycling drop-off was, so we went there first. It was really nice to get rid of so much stuff that had been clogging my bathroom. Even when I try to flatten milk bottles and such, they still take up a lot of room. And I don't think I found one place in the whole state of California that accepted mixed paper for recycling, so I had a lot of it built up. Big relief.
Then I drove all the way through town on 4th Street, which has a state highway number, and turned north on McCarran Blvd., which also has a state highway number. I'd found a pair of shopping centers across this street from each other that had several stores I wanted to go to.
First, I hit a Safeway, to fill in the blanks - all the things I hadn't been able to locate in that Raley's Grocery. I'm not a fan of Safeway but at least I can find things there. Actually, once again I didn't find any liners for my slow cooker, but I found pretty much everything else.
That was near a PetsMart, where I picked up some of the pills I give Gracie for her arthritis.
At the end of the row of shops I went to Big O Tires, because I'd been told a month and a half ago in Arizona (!) that I should get new tires in California. Which I didn't get around to doing because of lack of time. So now I'm a whole state/month later than I should be and even I can see that my 2 front tires ought to be replaced before I go much farther. These folks agreed with me and suggested I also replace 2 of my rear tires. Unfortunately, they only had 2 of the right type in stock, and they figured it'd take as much as 2 hours before they could get me taken care of. I didn't want to sit there for 2 hours. I remember clearly going to tire shops in other states and being taken care of quickly despite other customers also being there, so I couldn't figure out what the slow-down was here. I told them I'd think about it.
Across the road I went to a Discount Tire shop, where they told me almost exactly the same thing. Very discouraging. I decided to give myself time to think about it (as opposed to sitting in their lot waiting for an indeterminate time) and left.
I took the long route back to town (Google nearly hemorrhaged with this one) so I could swing by the campus of the University of Nevada, Reno. Nice-looking campus. Nearly 21,000 students in 2020, so I imagine there're more now.
I was curious why this ring road in Reno was named after, presumably, the same person the airport in Las Vegas was - McCarran Blvd, McCarran Airport. (I know the name of the airport because of watching Ocean's 11 - who knew it was educational?) Patrick McCarran, 1876-1954, was born in Reno and was the first US senator from Nevada that was born in Nevada. I'm guessing the road was named for him because he grew up here, and the airport was named for him because of his strong support for aviation - such as sponsoring the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938. He seems to have been a very conservative person, known to be anti-Semitic and a supporter of Franco and the Soviet Union. You might want to take a look at his Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/Pat-McCarran and wonder as I do what he'd be like today.
When I got back to the Grand Sierra Resort (GSR, they brand everything), I stopped by the casino as instructed by Karen yesterday. She'd told me to go to the casino, buy a Players card for $5, put $3 or so worth of play on it, then bring her the card so she could get the number off it and use it to give me a discounted price in the RV park. So I did.
First, that involved finding a place to park that wasn't valet parking and yet wasn't a mile from the door. It was a warm day and I hated to leave the critters in the RV, but I opened some windows and knew I wouldn't stay long anyway.
The steps up to the doors were a bit of a climb, but I think they expect most people to use valet parking and fancy curved steps look more glamorous. I asked at the first desk I came to, but it turned out to be a desk for the hotel guests, and they sent me much further down the line. Then I asked a woman not far from my age about a Players card, and that required my ID for some reason. They scanned my ID and printed me out a card that had my name on it - misspelled in 3 places. The woman ended up having to get it reprinted 4 times before their technology could get it right. Which seemed a little weird to me - they were scanning it directly off my driver's license and still couldn't read it. She gave me a card worth the $5 I'd paid for it, and when I asked for help in using it said she didn't have a clue because she never gambled.
I'd gone there expecting slot machines, figuring I'd need to change a $5 bill into quarters, and instead I was confronted with fancy video "slot" machines that had computers telling them what to display. They were all so busy-looking - I mean there were flashing lights and strange pictures all over their fronts and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what to do with this Players card. So I stopped a man wearing an orange suit jacket and name tag (a little like the casino workers in Ocean's 11 - my only information base, which is a little weird), told him I'd never been in a casino before and asked what I should do with this card, and he was extremely helpful.
He took me to a machine that required only 1¢ to start, showed me how I could double the bet or double the odds, and I won 25¢! This did not raise my hopes that I was born under a lucky star (well, I was, but not where gambling's concerned), which is just as well as every play after that was a loser. The nice man showed me a couple of other machines that needed 5¢ or 25¢ to start, I continued to lose, and he turned me over to an equally nice woman, wearing a vest and with a strong Asian accent that I found hard to understand, since she was wearing a mask, as I was. But she was patient and helped me lose a little more until I was down to only $2 left of the $5 I'd started out with, and I decided that was all Karen told me I'd need to do so I gave up. The nice woman showed me how to cash the card out - a machine gave me 2 crisp new $1 bills and my Players card back - and I went back out and took the dogs for a walk.
The lush grass I'd seen near where we parked turned out to be Astroturf, or whatever it's called these days, but the dogs needed somewhere to go and, from the way they were sniffing the ground, they were clearly not the first dogs to use that area, so I didn't worry much.
Then around to the campground on the other side of the building/hotel (multi-storied, tinted glass, multi-sided so every room had a view). I spent some time on the phone, calling a branch of every grocery store in town (even the Walmart, which put me on hold and then hung up on me 3 times before I gave up). Not one of them carried liners for slow cookers. I even called the local Williams Sonoma and she said she hadn't seen those for years; I told her I'd been finding them all over the country, even in small towns, and she sounded surprised.
I told her she should be carrying them, because with a liner in my slow cooker I could put in a whole chicken (and we all know how greasy they can be) and cook it and take it out and lift out the lining with all the grease inside it and put that in the frig until the grease gets hard and then throw it away and not have to wash out the pot. I'll often these days (when I have liners) season a whole chicken, cook it, eat a hind quarter for supper, and then eat off the rest for a week or so in salads and sandwiches and tacos. Without those liners I actually have to think about my meals; with them I don't. Who would have thought a city like Reno wouldn't have them when I really have been finding them all over the US, including small towns, just like I told that WS woman. It's a strange world.
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