Yet another excuse to post photos and links and some ramblings. I’ll put a jump here since some of the photos might take time to load…
I’m pretty happy with how this one turned out, given the circumstances: it was shot with the iPhone in “panorama” mode on the shore of Lake Tahoe.
I had a six hour layover in Denver. My flight from Reno came in to gate B47, and my flight to Austin was out of gate B52. So, given that I had six hours to walk five gates, and given that I had read both of the books I brought with me (mostly before my plane landed in Reno: yes, I should have planned better) I walked around a bit and took these photos.
RoadRich helped me figure out that this is a Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny”. I didn’t find any sort of display plaque in the airport, and I didn’t recognize it as a Jenny: probably because it wasn’t inverted.
Anyway, I was in Reno for the annual Smith and Wesson Collector’s Association Symposium. I got to meet a bunch of old friends and look at a bunch of nice guns for the second time in about a month, which makes me very very happy.
I always feel bad when I talk about the S&WCA Symposiums: since it is a closed member’s only meeting, I’m limited in what I can share, and I feel like I’m teasing some of you. I do think I can discuss this: one of the high points was Jim Supica’s talk on “Pocket Pistols – Tiny, Sneaky, and Bizarre Guns”. Mr. Supica is a great speaker, with a wonderfully dry sense of humor. If you ever have a chance to hear him talk at length, you should.
Oddly enough, the one item in his talk that people seemed most interested in wasn’t a “pocket gun” at all, even if you were Andre the Giant. Since he shared this video, I’m comfortable embedding it here:
If you like Smiths, you don’t have an excuse not to join the Association. Especially now that they’ve gotten rid of the requirement for sponsorship. (And the age limit as well: I believe the youngest current member is one year old.)
The Symposia pretty much run from Thursday morning to Saturday night (with check-in and setup Tuesday-Wednesday, and breakdown Sunday morning). I had time on Sunday to kick around a bit, and rental cars on Priceline were cheap, so I got one and drove from Reno to Carson City, and from Carson City to Lake Tahoe, then back towards Reno, around Sparks a bit, and then dinner and hotel.
The drive from Carson City to Lake Tahoe on US-50 is amazing. I texted Mike the Musicologist at one point that I felt like Sterling Archer: I go to these places and somehow I’m lucky enough to stumble across these incredible beautiful things. I’d like, at some point, to go back: I’m not sure if I’d stay in Reno itself, or try to find a place in Carson City or Tahoe and drive into Reno if I needed to.
I’d forgotten how much I loved mountains.
(My one regret: by the time I got back to Carson City, it was almost 4 PM, and the Nevada State Railroad Museum closes at 4:30. In retrospect, it would have been smarter to go to the museum first, then drive to Tahoe and back. There was plenty of daylight. Then again, that’s another reason to go back.)
(I did think about trying to find the old Michael Corleone place. But I checked the web first, and apparently it’s not accessible to the general public.)
To answer the question everyone asks me when I come back from one of these: no, I didn’t buy any guns, and I’m not having any guns shipped to my FFL later. I did pick up a few small things, basically just some old paper, and didn’t spend a lot of money on that. Nor did I drop any money at all in the machines or at the tables: the whole time I was there, I was so busy, I didn’t even think about putting a few dollars into the slots for the benefit of the house.
Lawrence described Reno to me as “depressing” before I left, and I can see why he did. What I saw of downtown was mostly a few big casinos, a fair number of boarded up storefronts, a few small businesses (mostly liquor and convenience stores and pawnshops) and a lot of panhandlers and homeless people. It seemed even gritter than Las Vegas off the Strip. (One of my friends observed that the McDonalds across the street had nothing in front of the counter: no condiments, no napkins, no plastic ware, nothing. There was also a big “you’ve got 30 minutes to eat and then you have to buy something or leave” sign on the wall.)
Does Reno pass the Keller test? Well, the weather was wonderful. But I’m not sure I could live in the city itself, or even in the suburbs. I think I could, however, live happily in Carson City. Or even in Lake Tahoe, if I had the money.
I ate a lot of burgers and burger-like things at The Habit Burger Grill in the hotel/casino food court. It was within easy walking distance, cheap, my friends wanted to go there, and I wanted to hang with them. But by Friday night, I was a little green around the gills at the thought of another burger, and ended up eating at Pearl Oyster Bar and Grill, which I thought was not unreasonably priced for what I got. (Half a dozen oysters, a cup of clam chowder, and a bowl of ramen. Really. Ramen in Austin is better, though.)
Thursday night was a hotel-catered cocktail party, which was actually more of a buffet, complete with carving station, oysters, shrimp cocktail, two kinds of ravioli…one more thing I’ll say in the S&WCA’s favor, they have run a mean cocktail party the past few years. The Saturday night dinner, on the other hand, was…hotel food. Not great, not the worst I’ve ever had.
There’s apparently a Basque place literally a stone’s throw from the hotel, and I loved the Basque food I had in Boise. But I found out about it too late, and instead had a good meal at Thai Corner Cafe (also within walking distance of the hotel).
I haven’t changed kit any since the Dallas trip. Once again, I skipped taking the big Nikon and stuck to the iPhone and the little Nikon, the latter of which did not see any use. (But it takes up very little space and I was happy having it along.) I was going to slip the TUFF products pack into my carry-on bags, but completely spaced on that.
And I didn’t find any used bookstores that were open on Sunday, sadly.