Day 6: As We Go Up, We Go Down

Traffic on the street below my room at the Red Lion Hotel in Salt Lake City was loud enough to roust me from sleep at 6AM, far ear­lier than I’d hoped to get up, since I didn’t get to sleep until well after mid­night. Not only was I up too early, but I had such a split­ting headache that I thought maybe some­one had attacked me with a shovel in my sleep. I got dressed and wan­dered down to the lobby, where I pushed through two full char­ter buses’ worth of Norwegians—or pos­si­bly Swedes—who had just arrived, and walked down the street to the Raw Bean cof­fee shop for my daily constitution.

After gath­er­ing myself and putting rub­ber to the road, I took a quick detour to Ikea, since I’d never been to one. I was dis­ap­pointed to find that they were out of lin­gonberry juice.

Having had enough of moun­tains and not find­ing myself inter­ested in Mormons, I gassed up and started dri­ving toward Reno, The Biggest Little City In The World.

After I escaped SLC, there was a stretch of I-80 that was so straight and flat and deserted that I drove at 75mph—the speed limit—without so much as mov­ing the steer­ing wheel for nearly 100 miles. It wasn’t long before I approached the Nevada state line, so I decided to cel­e­brate by vis­it­ing a casino as soon as humanly pos­si­ble. I’d used nearly all the cash I’d brought on the trip—I don’t like car­ry­ing large sums of cash on me, as I tend to lose things or let them fall out of my pockets—and played a penny slot with my last dol­lar, which I promptly lost. Back to the car I went.

The next stop on the road to Reno was Elko, which I only new as part of the title of “Fear And Loathing In Elko”, a short story Hunter Thompson wrote, pub­lished in the January 23, 1992 issue of Rolling Stone. The pur­pose of my visit was not to gam­ble, but to refuel, get cof­fee and find an ATM, not nec­es­sar­ily in that order. Something I dis­cov­ered is that it’s dif­fi­cult to get cof­fee in the after­noon in the West if you’re try­ing to avoid Starbucks. I tried four dif­fer­ent places I found search­ing the GPS, but all were either closed for the day or closed per­ma­nently. Phooey.

A friend sent me a link to a story in the Washington Post about Battle Mountain, and after read­ing it and see­ing the place from the inter­state, I’m pretty sure I did the right thing in mov­ing along.

Up another moun­tain and down again, I switched from lis­ten­ing to pod­casts in favor of Richmond Fontaine’s excel­lent 2002 album Winnemucca as I approached the city of the same name. The first song on the album, my favorite, is called “Winner’s Casino”, so I thought it fit­ting to stop at Winner’s Casino. It was the sad­dest place I’ve seen on this trip. Still, I won $3 on nickel video poker, so I can’t complain.

I approached Reno, with its glitzy, gaudy casi­nos and hotels beck­on­ing on the hori­zon, and, after two days of hard dri­ving across deserts and moun­tains, I couldn’t help but be tick­led by the prospect of a place that tries to lure peo­ple into its clutches with yel­low and red and blue and pink, when all it wants is their green.