Reno

We passed through Reno midday on Friday, stopping first in Sparks and then in downtown Reno, largely to indulge D's desire to play blackjack at tables with favorable rules (which he had researched carefully). Much to our bemusement, he seems to know what he's doing. I lost money - buying coffee at establishments that don't offer any possibility of winning. M pretty much broke even playing low-stakes video poker. But he walked away having leveraged his small stack of Benjies into a larger one.

Virginia Street was closed to traffic for a big beer festival, so M and I wandered past booths selling crafts, and t-shirts, and food, periodically ducking into casinos to cool off.

There's a lot of construction at the south end of the strip - it looks like maybe there are plans to redevelop the area around the river, which could actually be pretty neat. Though the geologist in me always wonders what a flash flood would look like in one of these urban channels. The other thing that I noticed was that the railroad no longer crosses Virginia at grade - waiting for trains to pass was almost as iconic as the "Biggest Little City in the World" sign.