If everything you know about the Biggest Little City (pop: 275K) you learned from a certain “Cops” parody on Comedy Central, here’s a crash course on doing the college town right, post-ski rat season.
Triple play
Beautifully backdropped by the High Eastern Sierra foothills, Reno’s the Row is hardly of the “skid” variety. It’s a troika of massive, hustling-n-bustling fancyish hotel-casinos perfect for us all-poker, no-powder types.
The Eldorado, the Silver Legacy and Circus Circus span six blocks wholly owned by Caesars Entertainment, Inc. (what Eldorado Resorts rebranded itself as after acquiring old Caesars and all its properties). Each has its own unique charms: Eldorado skews more upscale and sophisticated, Circus Circus has a giant arcade for kids.
But we ended up at the dining- and night life-focused, 1,720-roomed Silver Legacy, home to a mood-lit Ramsay’s Kitchen (warning vegans: best to avoid his delicious, had-parents take on “lollipops”) and the always queued- and gussied-up Aura Ultra Lounge.
Dromophobic? Not a problem. Enter any one of the three and you can easily visit the other two without ever stepping foot outside via the Row’s skyways.
Bonus: While the overly smokey, stale-smelling floors of the dizzying beep-booping, ding-a-linging casinos of yore could make non-gamers feel a certain kind of way, these days, the old rolled cigarette smog factor has been considerably reduced thanks to vape converts. Much obliged!
Fin city
Two hundred and fifty million years ago, Reno’s scariest creature wasn’t that angsty, 127-foot-tall clown named Topsy struggling to hold up the Circus Circus sign. It was the bowling lane-length prehistoric dino dolphin, er, sea reptile, called the ichthyosaur. Fitting, since back then, what is now the desertic Silver State was completely underwater (some yearn for those days over the summer).
Reno’s groovy Nevada Art Museum has devoted 9,000 square feet — its entire third floor — to these lovingly nicknamed “sea dragons” in an exhibit running through mid-January of next year called Deep Time.
It features the world’s largest collection of ichthyosaur fossils including a 33-foot Triassic Period skeleton of one, the most complete in the world, along with a life-size, e-wall-simulated sea dragon to swim-walk with, no trunks needed.
Kiddos will especially love (and maybe try to outdo — sorry, parents) the exhibit’s room filled entirely with a massive collection of dinosaur toys; another room (possibly for less-sober grown-ups) lets you see the world, as an ichthy would see it, “underwater.” GA is $15.
The mural of the story
Game respects game, and nowhere else is that better on display than in Reno’s unusually cordial street art scene.
Get used to the name Erik Burke, or rather his initials E.B., as you’ll be seeing a lot of it on Pineapple Pedicab’s art tours of downtown where the world-renowned and Reno-born E.B. has painted giant murals on the sides of several multi-storied buildings, including one of his wife (awww) and also signs them with his age at their time of completion. Best part: Local graffiti taggers respectfully leave them be and (mostly) undefiled, according to my no-fear pedaler guide Taz.
You’ll also come across other artists’ trippy works like a flying bus formerly driven IRL, cut in half then glued back together on a rising stand, plus other sculptures and installations lucky enough to have been spared dismantling after a gig at nearby Burning Man such as the Space Whale (a 40-foot, stained-glass mommy cetacean and her calf).
The hour-long tour of Reno’s other nickname they hope to one day make stick — Art Town — is $55 per person, with each pedicab sitting up to three.
Vroom with a view
Listen here, buddy, drop the spray paint and back away from the electric cars — these are non-Elon creations you’ve stumbled across at Reno’s National Automobile Museum. In fact, the very first cars ever marketed were all electric, preceding gas-powered ones by years and years.
You’ll learn this and mucho mas at the multi-zoned (classic, race cars, celebrity mobiles, etc.) NAM, just a five-minute walk from the Row. Its exhibits come in large part thanks to the late William Fisk Harrah. There was only one thing the late hotel-casino magnate loved more than gamblizing the state, and that was cars (he owned 1,400 of them). He had an army of scouts scour the country for unique and classic ones, some literally uncovered beneath tarps and stashed away in barns in the middle of nowhere.
Once Harrah kicked the can in 1978, his massive collection changed hands (mostly into those of then-hospitality giant Holiday Inn) but after public demand, private sales, auctions and the like, many found their way to this place, opened in 1989, now home to some 240-plus rare and restored vehicles from the late 19th century up until today.
Ford Model T? Check. Elvis’s Caddy Eldorado Coupe? Yep. That vehicular Frankenstein Jay Leno stitched together from two wrecks that’s half-Jeep, half-Ferrari dubbed the Jerrari? Heck yes. And do you like the cut of that Doc Brown-worthy DeLorean’s jib over yonder? “Adopt” it, or any of the other cars on display (meaning, donate money to help keep it in tip-top condition and land your name on a plaque right next to it). Just no actual fiddling around with said foster.
Tix are $15 for adults, $10 for kids.
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