Over Spring Break we went to a timeshare in Reno for a week, well, most of a week.  We spent two nights with Marty, a high school friend of Gail's that lives near Sacramento with her very good friend Don.

The drive from Reno over the Donner summit onI-80 can be a very pretty drive or it can look like this

Fortunately, this photo makes the conditions look worse than they really were.  Probably, because of the distance involved.  That dark, nearly horizontal line on the opposite hill are snow sheds for the former Southern Pacific, now Union Pacific line.

 These pictures were shot around Don's home.

Here I am with Don and Marty.  While Gail and Marty caught up, Don and I went into Sacramento to the California Railroad Museum.  Very nice.  Also visited a couple of good hobby shops.

On the return trip we took a right at Auburn on Highway 49, the Gold Rush Highway and drove through Lotus where we lived many years ago. 

  In the days long ago, Harry (my brother) and I slept in this cabin while may parents and sister, Jennifer, lived in a small trailer that was parked behind the cabin.  In those days there was no bathroom in the cabin so we used an outhouse when the bathroom in the trailer was unavailable.  I don't believe the cabin was painted this color when we lived there but I do remember Mom painting part of the cabin with pink and black.  I remember sitting on this porch reading comic books and Boy's Life, I had several comic book subscriptions as well as one to Boys Life.  The bar at the foot of this hill, where our landlord lived, is now the headquarters for a river rafting outfit, as it has been for quite a few years now.  The couple who owned the bar were amusing at times.  They had a good sized vegetable garden and we shared in the bounty it produced.  No matter how the vegetables turned out, large or puny, the guy always blamed it (and several other things) on the nuclear bomb testing going on over in Nevada.

   This field is across the road from the cabin and was the home of a horse named Bell who we used to feed apples and carrots.  There is a stream running down through that draw and it was our water supply.  A little ways above this picture, far enough to be above the cabin, was a small dam.  A pipe ran from that pond to our trailer.

This was our store and Post Office.    Over the years since it has been a store then not.  Then back to a store.  It was a store again until very recently (when I looked through the window I could see some food still on the shelves.  A fellow who was there told me it was about to become the ops office for a river rafting company.

   The old one room school.  I did third grade here along with 11 other students spread among the grades 1-8.  I started fourth grade here and Harry started first grade before we moved to Santa Margarita.  To see more on Santa Margarita, go to my train web site by clicking here.  As you can see in the picture we were able to catch the ghost of a former teacher in an area that used to be the baseball field.  The story has it that she was done in by one of those unruly 8th grade ranch boys.

After leaving Lotus we drove over to Placerville to buy some chains that were required to get over the mountains and back to Reno.  You may have noticed that in the pictures of both Don's house and Lotus everything looks pretty wet.  That is because it rained the whole time we were there.  And, when it rains at the lower elevations it is snowing in the upper elevations.  Hence, the requirement to buy chains.  We were doubly fortunate in that after buying the chains we didn't need to put them on and the car we were renting had tires the same size has Gail's new Escape.  So, we shipped the chains home, along with a bunch of other stuff we got later in the trip.  After we got home we discovered we were really only singularly fortunate.  It is against the law to use chains on paved highways in Minnesota.

While in Reno, we did the normal sort of things  ate a lot, lost a little money in the slot machines, ate some more and so on.  We were surprised to discover that shows in Reno have changed a lot since we used to live nearby.  No longer do the stars come and play for weeks at a time.  Nowadays they zip in for one or two nights and then are gone.  We were also surprised to see that the lounge shows of yesteryear have gone the way of the dinosaurs that I am beginning to feel like.  We spent one afternoon in the town of Truckee which had quite a few neat shops.  Bought some cooking type things in one very nice shop.  I'm not sure why, you can get the same stuff at the discount mall three miles from our house but maybe it is a time thing.  We had time to poke around there and seldom have poke around time at home.  We also spend a full day in Virginia City which was home to the Comstock Lode, a fabulous amount of silver.  Mark Twain also lived there so you have an automatic double attraction.  Somehow, Virginia City managed to live in a time machine for most of it's post-silver days and as a result, the buildings that were there when Mark Twain was there are still there.  This is what a small part of main street looks like today.

   We bought a lot of stuff in Virginia City.  Some of you may see some of it around Christmas 06.  The climb up out of the valley that Reno sits in is kind of neat and we stopped about 2/3's of the way up to take some pictures.  From some of them we stitched together this panoramic shot.  This panorama was made with a free program called autostitch get it here 

So, there you have it.  Our week in Reno