My dad and aunt have already gone to bed, and the cocktail waitress is nowhere in sight. My mother pushes the "repeat bet" button on her slot machine a little too hard and mutters something about "going downhill."
We're in Reno, self-proclaimed Nevada's "biggest little city."
I can't say if that's true though, since most of what we saw of Reno was confined in four light-blocking walls surrounding hundreds of beeping, singing and blaring slot machines and a few tired-eyed dealers. I enjoy the novelty of it anyhow, and conclude that maybe Monday night isn't the best night to get a party going. Especially after eating one pound of prime rib offered specially by one casino's restaurant. My stomach still hurts.
When you drive outside of Reno the city is bigger than it seems when cooped up in a casino. Once you add in Sparks and other various suburbs, it creates a decent American sprawl throughout the small valley it sits in. We drove up, on a winding, sharp-edged road, to Virginia City.
Virginia City was, in its heyday, a gold-prospecting city that spawned many legends, helped out by the then-budding writer Mark Twain. Twain wrote for a newspaper there and probably had a drink or at least a good chat in any of the several old false-front saloons that line the main street. We followed his footsteps and visited a few, starting with the Washoe (for some reason my aunt wouldn't buy the "I swallowed at the Washoe" t-shirt), migrating down to the Silver Queen, Bucket of Blood and the Bonanza. The Bucket of Blood (named, I learned, because of a bar fight so bloody that the next day the cleaner swore he mopped up a bucket of it) has the best location and shock value for its name, but I preferred the quieter Bonanza.
We were in Nevada not just to follow Mr. Twain and see if we could get either get one last free drink out of the cocktail waitress or one last jackpot at our hotel casino before turning in, but also to pick up my cousin at the airport. That accomplished we powered back to Paisley and my last week in the U.S. this year.
Freshly back from the gold-rush stories of Virginia City however, we get a renewed proposal my father's been wanting to take up for years: go find a certain abandoned mine claim near Paisley.
So, at 5 a.m. we haul ourselves out of bed and go up the hill before my dad's friend can tell us we're "burning daylight," one of his favorite sayings. Into the pickups, we bump along on our way out of town until we realize my mother's idea of where we're going and my dad's idea of where we're going are divergent, and since Mom's the one that initially found the description of the location, she wins. We run back to the house for another look at their notes, and finally we're on our way.
The road goes up behind Paisley on a barely maintained track in a direction I've never gone before. The valley drops below us and the bluffs along the desert that look so huge from the highway below now seem like ripples of sand on a beach. The desert is enormous.
We're not in the desert now, however. There are stands of juniper and fir, interspersed with tall grasses, rabbit brush, indian paintbrush and the ever-present sagebrush.
After about 45 minutes we stop and look at the remains of an old mine. Perhaps not as historic as the mines that were operating in Virginia City when Mark Twain was there, but weathered enough that the timbers for the supports above the tunnel are bleached by the sun, and you can imagine doddering grizzled prospectors washing themselves and their gold pans at the remnants of an ancient wooden trough nearby. We examine the rocks around it for sparkles or speckles, but conclude that it was probably mined out before it was abandoned.
Another few stops to look at likely places for mining don't pan out either, ha ha, so we bump back along the road down to the valley while my father's friend hikes down on foot. We see eagles and quail and jackrabbits as we slowly turn our tires down the hill and back to my last night in Paisley. It's time to pack.
Next stop: Perth, Australia via Redmond, Oregon, L.A. and Brisbane. Goal: Foshan, China.
