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Reno is about 20 minutes north of North Lake Tahoe, just over the California border and in Nevada. It’s famous for many things - casino’s, Harrah’s, and of course, it’s where part of Sister Act was filmed. I spent my Friday and Saturday there last week.

Getting there

I went with Valerie, because we both agreed Valentine’s day is totally stupid and is a waste of money so we decided to go somewhere instead of forking out for a miserable dinner somewhere where they bleed your wallet dry. Reno seemed to be as appealing as anywhere, so we set about making the arrangements.

Last time I went to Lake Tahoe, the snow was so thick that my car was all over the road and how I got back in one piece is nothing short of a miracle. I was therefore in no rush to traverse the winding mountain roads of the Sierra’s, so we opted for the Greyhound bus. We got about $80 knocked off the price by the casino’s, which I’m still not sure how they make their money on that. As well as that, we got $13 each credit at the Sands casino in Reno free with our tickets.

The bus on the way up was a little cramped, but altogether quite relaxing. Unfortunately we had two nightmare passengers - one, a young woman who didn’t shut up the entire time talking to anybody that would listen to her totally crap stories, and crying down the phone to her mother. Luckily, she got off in Sacramento, only to be replaced by an equally annoying old woman who was amazed at almost every view from the bus, and felt it extremely important that she make loud exclamations to ensure every passenger was aware of her profound experiences. And her laugh was both irritating and needlessly loud, causing all the other passengers to cringe. We ran a little behind schedule but ended up at Circus Circus in Reno around 1.30pm on Friday.

Our Hotel

As we were staying only one night, the accommodation wasn’t very important and we just wanted somewhere cheap but nice. I don’t condone gambling, but if there’s one thing that’s good about casinos it’s that they have a ability to make everything else cheap. We spent $50 and got a huge room at Fitzgerald’s Irish casino plus a $5 money off coupon for their huge $9.95 buffet. The casino was actually quite charming, and the room was excellent.

First Day

We spent the first day just looking around the city - it’s pretty small so you don’t really even need a car. The weather was pretty good, it wasn’t very warm but it was sunny which made it feel warmer. We visited a lot of the big casinos like Circus Circus and Harrah’s, which are pretty impressive. Circus Circus is especially fun, they have a kids ‘casino’ which we spent most of our time in. Rather than play for money, it’s more like a fun fair and you play for tokens or terrible little stuffed elephants and the like.

It didn’t take long to discover that a lot of the kids in the place seemed to be unaware that they were winning tokens, or else they were just being careless. Either way, it worked out very well for Valerie and me - we nicked all the tokens that the kids left behind and ended up with a stash of over 200, which actually doesn’t buy you a lot in a casino. We traded them for two fluffy dice and a load of lollipops. Not bad considering it didn’t cost anything.

We spent most of our money on more fun things like the dance machine, Whack a Mole and this game where you have to burst a balloon by squirting water into a clown’s mouth. We lost every time. I also lost a dart throwing game. I suck at fairground games.

In the evening we went for dinner at a place called the Nugget, which is a casino famous for it’s Awful Awful burger - which is a half pound burger with half a pound of fries, for $5. It was actually pretty decent. There didn’t appear to be much happening in the city that night, so rather than go to a show that we probably would only half enjoy, we just headed back to the hotel and went to bed. I had intended to call the front desk and request a 5.30am wakeup call for our neighbours, just to be annoying, but alas, I forgot. Shame, could have been very funny.

Day Two: Grand Sierra

On the second day we weighed up our options and decided that we should go out to Grand Sierra. It’s a casino resort a few miles outside of town that supposedly had loads of things to do. We checked out, left our stuff at the bell desk and got breakfast at the casino’s buffet (remember the $5 off coupon? Yeah, we forgot to use it…d’oh!). The buffet was excellent, it had all you can eat everything, and after I walked outta the place with a bit of a John Wayne strut going on. Appetites satisfied, we took the bus out to the casino. It’s basically a huge hotel out on it’s own and my goodness it’s got everything! The activities outside weren’t as impressive as I’d hoped, but we did go go-karting twice - once on the road track (I won), and once on the drift track (again, I won). It was fun, you only get 5 minutes for $6 but it is fun. The drift track especially. I did a badass powerslide around a corner passing a really cocky guy in the process.

Straight after the karting, we played a round of mini-golf on a rather poor course. It’s really not American mini-golf unless it has a windmill in my opinion. Guess who won, as usual.

After an exhaustive day of winning everything, we headed back inside the casino to take a look about. This place was huge. Even it’s bathrooms were cool - they were pimped out in black marble and they didn’t have sinks - they had a marble bench angled downwards to drain the water. They had a Johnny Rockets restaurant where we got a great milkshake, and an entire shopping mall on the floor below, which included a whole arcade of kids games. It’s a similar idea with the tokens. Some kid hit the jackpot on Monopoly and won 500 tokens, but walked off with collecting them. Luckily, I was there to collect his winnings. It took close to 10 minutes for the machine to spit out all 500 tokens, which I took a video of. We spent the tokens on a horrible water-filled ball monstrosity, a jumping rubber frog, some popping candy and a bottle of bubbles. Well spent considering the quality of the prizes.

Thoroughly satisfied with our winnings, we called it quits and went back to Reno where we took some more photos and bought a few souvenirs. We had dinner at Fitzgerald’s again, this time at the restaurant and got a rather average grilled cheese sandwich. Two buffets in one day seemed a bit much.

Almost out of time, we went to the Sands casino to spend our $13 credit, only to get totally confused with how the system works and wasted all our credits. I won a $1.25 overall, which I was quite happy about. Better than Valerie, she won a quarter. Worst of all, she claimed her winnings with not a hint of embarrassment.

The bus got us back to San Francisco around 2am and was much more pleasant than the ride up. A great little weekend, and overall pretty cheap. Worth going to if you don’t have the time to go to Vegas. Check out the rest of the pics on my Flickr.

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