Boise and all that

We left Boise two days ago, and were sad to go. The weather was hell for a poor pale bastard like myself though - most of the time I sat in the shade or in the car with the Air Conditioning on 'freeze'. On Thursday we helped Monica move from the house she shared with her friend in Nampa, just outside Boise. We followed her car through the incongruous greenery of a rural Idaho, a lush landscape that sits in a desert.

After a drive through the heat blasted landscapes of Idaho, and a jump across the border to Nevada, we sat in a Casino/restaurant on an Indian reservation in McDermitt, NV, where we were stared at like a dog that's just been shown a card trick and I ordered the only vegetarian option on the menu (fries).

Walking into the casino was a culture shock, but nothing compared to arriving at Winnemucca, NV, where we stayed in a decent enough motel. Winnemucca is one street lined with casinos. There are some fast food joints. There is a lot of loudness. It is overlooked by a huge mountain that looks like it's made of sand, and seemed grey as we arrived on Friday evening and burnt orange as we left on the Saturday morning.

After an attempt to find food somewhere on the strip at 11pm (couldn't, but almost tripped over a tiny frog that was crossing the road - another reminder of our desert location) we went to the Red Lion hotel/casino/restaurant directly across the road from our motel, where I was asked to perform an impression of an Irishman for a group of wide-eyed waitresses.

As we hit the road the next morning, after checking out the Wrangler rodeo jeans selection in the local cowboy store, I saw the charred remains of a pick-up truck and trailer still smoking at the side of the interstate. I didn't want to think about what had just happened, but couldn't help considering what the unusual smell in the air was.

After a brief sojourn in Reno (a street of sleazy sweaty hotels and motels as well as casinos encased in concrete bunkers all along 4th Ave), where Ed tried to get some intelligence on where the local firing range was, we ended up driving across the state line into California, then along the north of Lake Tahoe and then back into Nevada in the hunt for cheap motels; which we found in South Lake Tahoe, a town full of bunker casinos and fat bug-eyed fuckers trying to win their weight in cash from the rigged machines. Children in the casinos at 11pm. Walked the floors of the casinos feeling ill at the spectacle. Nothing funny about addiction, I note. Wow, everything I hate about America in one building. The beach here is beautiful, though, but the shadow of the casinos is cast across even that at certain hours of the day.