Summer 2021 Western Trip – 1 – Sautéing on the Reno Blacktop

Josh taking the co-pilot seat to get us started

After our short excursion to Ice House a couple of weeks ago, it’s time to hit the road for our big Summer trip, an extended adventure through 8 Western states. Like our other longer trips, this one is going to be a combination of work and vacation days. At least this time the boys don’t have school, which should give us a bit more flexibility, but like usual, we need to plan our stops around work days and cell coverage (for internet).

Our RV spot was a quick but hot 5 minute walk from the pool and hotel

For this trip we’re planning on stopping at Reno, NV (mostly as a way point), Utah (for some snorkeling and then to join up with some of Lana’s East Coast cousins), Jackson, WY (Yellowstone), Montana (more Yellowstone and some other adventures), Coeur D’alene, ID, Washington (a couple of state parks), Oregon (visiting some friends and seeing Crater Lake), and lastly Lake Siskiyou, CA (assuming it’s not on fire).

Stop 1 – Reno

I’m typing this up as Lana is driving us through the desert of central Nevada. We left Reno a few hours ago, and are roughly halfway through our longest drive of the trip, to Bonneville Seabase, which is a bit west of Salt Lake City.

Lana, putting in some quality time behind the wheel

Staying for Liam’s 3 on 3 basketball playoffs meant getting a late start on the trip. Happy to report that despite highly suspect “coaching” by yours truly, unstoppable Team 6 stunned Vegas odds makers by finishing in first place.

We left home for Reno on Sunday afternoon. We would have left earlier in the weekend but both boys were wrapping up their basketball season, and there’s no way they’d miss playoffs. We ended up pulling into the Grand Sierra Resort RV parking lot at a somewhat reasonable time (at least for us) of 11pm. We’ve stayed at the Grand Sierra many times, but this was our first time in the RV.

Hot pavement means Boomer gets to wear his booties, which he just loves oh so much

In keeping with our family tradition of traveling through extreme weather events, we hit Reno during a decent heatwave, with the mercury pushing 103. Now 103 isn’t normally that bad (I hear that’s sweater weather in Phoenix), but in this case we were in an RV sitting in full sun on a black top parking lot. Not helping the issue is that our RV has about the same insulative properties as an aluminum can. In related news, this got me fondly reminiscing about our two Texas ice storm experiences.

Considering outside wasn’t much hotter than inside, the boys were happy to watch some Euro 2020 on the outside TV

The plan was to put in a full day of work on Monday, and half day of work on Tuesday before officially starting a week and a half of PTO for me, and slightly less PTO for Lana. The heat was not our friend. Even though we had our AC going nearly 24/7, the inside of the RV hit a sauna-like high of 96. I can’t even imagine what the situation would have been like if we didn’t have AC. Related to that, we did have a bit of a scare that first night when at 1:45am our electric management system cut off our power due to low current from the RV park electrical pedestal. Fortunately the spot next to us was open and working so I went out and plugged into that one for the rest of our stay.

While cooling off in the pool was nice, we were very suspicious of the extremely poor visibility in the water. Hopefully it was just too much sunscreen, and not other stuff.

While RV Parking lot stays aren’t our favorite, at least this one came with all the amenities of the Grand Sierra Resort. For us that meant the pool, the arcade for the boys, driving range, but mostly just walking around in highly functional air conditioning. I’m assuming next time we stop in for a visit, it will be to stay in the hotel and not the RV park.