Twelve Hours to Tahoe

There’s one thing I am sure of, one of those life lesson type deals that I learned about myself on this sojourn to Reno – I am pretty sure that I hate traveling. Don’t get me wrong, I like seeing new places, and learning new things and all that, but the act of getting there, well, I’d rather step on the wrong side of a rake.

Now Team in Training is a fantastic organization and is exceptionally good at motivating a broad swath of people to do extraordinary things like raise a ton of money and bike/run/swim (or some combination therein) a distance that goes far beyond anything enjoyable or fun.

But I won’t be nominating them up for “Travel Agent of the Year”, either.

I think the only way getting to Reno could have taken any longer was if I scooted there on my rear end carrying every one’s luggage on my shoulders. We left for the airport from Jersey City at 5am (the plane boarded at 7:15am) and we didn’t arrive in Reno until what felt like the following week.

Addendum: I got about 15 to 30 minutes of sleep the night before we left for Tahoe. We got home Thursday night at 11pm and had to finish packing and the pedals that I had put back on my mountain bike had to come off so I could get them back on “Orange Lightning” that had left for Reno on the 24th by truck (and probably got there faster). And I got one pedal off and spent the rest of the night and morning using every tool I had in my house and wizened brain cell in my head to pry off the other.

Eventually I found this old combo tool from my mountain biking bag that was nice and thin and got into that little gap that you need to get in there to get pedals on and off bikes. And I figured out the “Righty-Tighty, Lefty Loosy” rule was backwards for bike pedals (otherwise they’d spin right off when you pedaled).

Never have I felt such a sense of accomplishment for completing such a minor and simple task than unscrewing a pedal. Beginning a long trip exhausted and sleep-deprived is about as fun as going to the Dentist’s after downing an entire box of Oreos with a bag of Gummi Bears as a chaser.

There’s a caveat here: there really aren’t direct flights to Reno as it’s the ugly step sister to Los Vegas, so you are left with few options on how to get there: Fly to Chicago and then go to Reno or what we did – Fly over Reno to San Francisco, wait there for three hours for a connecting flight then fly backwards to Reno.

We landed in Reno at 2pm.

The moment you step into the Reno airport you instantly understand that you are most definitely in the ugly sister city to Los Vegas. There are slot machines every 15 yards, a bit dated and sad, much like the diminutive airport itself. The finest feature of Reno International was that the toilets had that cool self-flushing light beam thing. There was a permanent poster on the wall that specifically welcomed bowlers to Reno. When you are a town that targets marketing directly at the professional bowling community on a permanent basis, well, do I really need to insert a joke in here? We’ve all seen the movie Kingpin, haven’t we?

And we had to wait about an hour for the shuttle bus to leave for our hotel. Several folks thought better of this, and rented cars. Well, they missed a hootenanny of a time, let me tell you. I took my camera phone and documented every she-mullet within picture-snapping distance. Just drop me a line and I’ll message you photo essay on the ladies of Reno supporting the “business in the front, party in the back” lifestyle.

We spent an hour on that bus driven by a local that had clearly lost his mind several years ago, but somehow managed to hang onto his commercial driver’s license. It was the kind of bus that when you sat down, you had that feeling that you’d get if you were in one of those horror-slasher movies and you just realized that you were totally screwed.

On this ride, we wound around the big lake, but we couldn’t really see the stunning vistas of the blue upon blue lake or the mountains that cradled the horizon, or the huge pines and rock formations. The bus windows were coated with those ads that seem to wrap around every bus like a candy bar wrapper, making everything seem sort of fuzzy. While the bus driver did his impression of Dale Earnhardt using a touring bus, some one told us that the hill we were careening down was Spooner, the same hill-laden road we would spend more than an hour biking up a few days later.

Adjusting for the time difference, that makes the door to door travel time more than 12 hours. You can nearly fly to India in that time. I know because I have. Twelve hours and you’re still in the same country. I think if you take 12 hours to get somewhere, there better be some folks on the other end waiting for you in grass skirts who are eager to hand you Mai-Tais and adorn you with flower necklaces.

Twelve hours, 12 straight hours. I don’t think I would like to do anything fun for 12 hours straight, let alone something as tedious and mind-numbingly dull as sitting in a aluminum cigar and getting handed Diet Pepsis by artificially chipper attendants every regimented 20 minutes.

In 12 hours , assuming I kept the same pace, I could have done the 100-mile ride twice and have started my third lap.

One more thing that is also dragging on is my fundraising. I have just a bit more than $500 left to raise, so please take the time to head over to that "Donate to Eric's Fundraiser" link on the upper right.