Fish out of water

The forecast for today was for storms over the passes we had to negotiate to get across Nevada. We stopped in Wendover, Utah to ask about the roads. No one could help except to answer Bill's other question: "What do you do in Wendover?" The answer: "Gamble or drink!" Wendover straddles the Nevada/Utah border. It is clear which state you are standing in when you walk down Main Street. Six huge casinos on the Nevada end of the street advertise rooms for 1500 people. Looking down the street on the Utah side, you see no casinos, just little stores. The most obvious one is a pawn shop with big signs offering cash for gold, diamonds or guns!

We carried on working our way through the storms, passed up the town of Elco and all its casinos and headed for Winnemucca - right in the middle of Nevada and the last relatively inhabited place on the map. Because we weren't sure how far we were going to get, we had no room booked so when we phoned from Elco we got the last non-smoking room (there are probably only three in the whole town!). When we pulled up in front of it we realized that adding a hotel was an obvious afterthought. The casino is what you must be there for. We fought our way through the cloud of smoke, past semi-conscious people at slot machines (their fingers are awake, the rest of them left long ago) to the main desk. We used the back entrance from then on but only to slip in quickly after Bill bent over to pick up 22 casings on the sidewalk by the door! Shades of Elliot in Australia with the only option at this point being the car. We bolted up to our room which is amazingly okay, and will be slipping out early in the am heading for the Nevada/Oregon border as fast as possible. Talk about a fish out of water, I'm a goldfish whose bowl was dumped in the everglades...