Traveling from California to Reno over the Sierras can be a bit dicey, especially during those times of year — which is to say, most of the year — when there is a possibility of snow. Just ask the Donner Party. We’ve done it a number of times in an RV or other touring vehicle, and it wasn’t always smooth sailing. Years ago, Dennis used to take that route by rail on the California Zephyr (an inspiration for our son’s name) every Christmas to visit his parents in Arkansas — the perfect time to see the Sierras, and the perfect way to get across them. This time, however, we had to settle for a bus; but at least we didn’t have to do the driving.

Bus trip to Reno

We had an afternoon bus from Fresno to Sacramento, and then a transfer from Sacramento to Reno, beginning in the afternoon. So we had the morning to spend more time with our relatives in Fresno before they dropped us at the train station, which also serves as the Greyhound station.

Our driver leaving Fresno was quite rude, at least to a number of passengers. Though he was courteous enough (or at least non-rude enough) to us. Maybe being seasoned adults has its advantages. Anyway, the bus was running about 15 minutes late, which concerned us because it was a tight connection in Sacramento.

Not to warry, we still got there in plenty of time, and even had a wait of about half an hour before the bus departed Sacramento — this one, we were happy to see, with a courteous driver at the helm.

There was indeed a little snow in the pass, though not so much as to make us fear that driving was hazardous. (When it gets snowy enough, there’s a checkpoint to make certain your vehicle is wearing chains; and the time it applied to us and we were not carrying any chains, they conveniently sold us some.) One of the points of interest on this route is the picturesque town of Truckee, where Charlie Chaplin filmed “The Gold Rush” in 1925; and in some ways it doesn’t look a whole lot different now.

Returning to Reno

When we pulled into Reno, snowflakes were butterflying down more heavily, and there was already a pretty thick white carpet on the ground. Dennis, whose feet were being irritated by closed shoes, was wearing sandals, and opted to continue wearing them, even wading through the snow. We were picked up downtown by Kimberly’s brother Chris and driven to their parents house, where we’d be staying a few days.

Reno is known as The Biggest Little City In The World, since it has so many recreational and cultural opportunities in town or in the vicinity — including, of course, a considerable tourist trade thanks to the casinos. (But did you know it also has more writers per capita than any other U.S. city? Well now you do.) For us, it’s also been the busiest little city in the world, because this was always where we put a new show together during our days as touring entertainers. That’s all behind us now, but this brief stay still had us hopping around taking care of various errands. One of which was submitting, to the California Secretary of State, the paperwork to dissolve the nonprofit corporation we’d established for our theatre business.

Still, we managed to have plenty of time to have fun with the relatives, including Kimberly’s niece Jenny and nephew Joey — the latter observing a birthday during our stay. And one day we went on a little gambling mission at Atlantis casino (playing only penny machines), and got a bit of reminder of why we don’t gamble more often.

Kimberly’s parents invited us to go with them to see “Everything, Everywhere, All At Once”. (We were rather surprised that they’d have an interest in a film that is so… what’s the proper word… weird?) And we were happy to do so, since it had intrigued us for a while, and even more so since we’d watched the Oscars a few days earlier, when it bagged Best Picture honors. It very much met — or even exceeded — our expectations. (How can you not love a movie that has talking rocks in it?) And we were delighted to see that Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan, two superb performers who’d been underrated for too many years, finally get their due with their respective Oscars. For our money, however, it should have been a clean sweep for the Asian cast, with Stephanie Hsu winning one as well.

One outing that was both business and pleasure was a trip to Scheel’s, the most stupendous sporting goods and outdoor adventure emporium in the entire galaxy. It’s several floors of sports equipment, camping items, bicycles, hunting and fishing gear, shoes, and just about anything else that could be in any way connected to physical recreation of any type. The store also features a huge aquarium, a 65-foot Ferris wheel, a shooting gallery, a sports simulator, and (for some reason) a display of animatronic U.S. presidents. But our purpose for going to this outsized outlet was to get just a few little things for our travels, such as durable plastic eating utensils. Well, that and just to have fun browsing and marveling.

Kimberly took an excursion to Best Buy in search of a new laptop, which was becoming a necessity since we’d been sharing one for the past 15 months. The one she wanted was not in stock, but they could ship one to the house within a couple of days. It finally came, but there was a mistake in the credit card charges, which we tried to correct by calling the center it was supposedly shipped from. But when we called the number we obtained, it turned out to be a church. Anyway, we finally got it straightened out, but that was part of a consistent pattern of snafus we’ve experienced ordering from Best Buy.

(On a previous occasion, we ordered a refurbished VHS converter, which was defective. We returned it at a Best Buy outlet, and they said they’d refund the money on our credit card; instead, they issued the refund to the credit card of whoever did the refurbishing — someone in Minnesota. It took several phone calls to Best Buy, and even calling and writing to our bank before the mess was corrected. But we digress -something we’ve been known to do before.)

One other thing we did in Reno was get some photos done and submit our applications for new passports. Our old ones still had a couple of years left on them, but we were concerned about running out of pages — quite a few of the pages were covered with stamps from various and sundry immigration officials after all the globetrotting we’d done — so we wanted to play it safe. Now the thing is that when you apply for a new passport, you have to send in your old one, and thus we were temporarily passportless, And what we didn’t know yet was that there was a LOOOOOONG delay in passport processing because of a post-pandemic backlog. Such a long delay that there was a very real risk our passports would not be ready in time for our planned (and booked) departure date. But that was a crisis for another day.

Apropos of that, we informed Kimberly’s folks that we’d made a decision to return to Cambodia in the fall and accept an offer to be paid teachers for an entire year. Though we’d made this commitment a few weeks earlier, we were just now announcing it to friends and family. And this surreal step we were about to take was beginning to feel more real.

3/25 -31/2023