Jaunted

Summer Travel / Nevada Travel / Las Vegas Travel / Lake Mead / → All Tags

Stretch Summer Until Almost Winter at Lake Mead

Okay so the weather has been feeling a whole lot more like the oncoming winter lately. In some cities across the nation the mercury is dropping, fashion has gone from tank tops to turtlenecks, and in Minnesota's case, snow has already fallen. For those of you that just need to get your last days of Summer in, there is an answer. Lake Mead, Nevada.

You know...it's that place visitors to Vegas go to when they're absolutely bored with happens on The Strip. It's just about an hour's drive from the lights and action of LV and serves as a playground for everything summer. After all, it is out in the middle of the desert.

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Events / Nevada Travel / Hot Air Balloons / Reno Travel / Festival Travel / → All Tags

Are 100 Hot Air Balloons Enough Reason to Go to Reno?

Just one more thing for your iCal: the Great Reno Balloon Race from September 7-9, 2012.

C'mon—admit it. You've totally had that fantasy where you're in a field surrounded by hot air balloons launching, or, even better, you're in a balloon, and surrounded in blue skies by countless others. Making this dream a reality isn't hard at all, since hot air balloons can be had for a price; however, witnessing a mass flight of them is far rarer.

To do this, just head on over to Reno, Nevada for the 31st annual Great Reno Balloon Race, the world's largest free hot-air ballooning event. For the estimated 150,000 race-goers and 100+ balloons, the action begins early each morning with a glow show as the balloons fire up and whoosh heated air into their billowing fabric for the beginning of the mass ascension.

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Airport News / Airports / Nevada Travel / RNO / → All Tags

$40 Million is the Cost to Upgrade and Update Reno Airport

They’re not getting ‘Move B*tch Mac & Cheese’ like travelers in Atlanta, but despite lack of a Ludacris restaurant there’s still much to be excited about in Reno, Nevada. The Biggest Little City in the World is upgrading their airport, and they’re doing their best to make it one of the best around.

In total airport officials have secured lots of cash to upgrade and update, and it looks like they’re planning to spend around $40 million to spiff things up. Bulldozers and construction crews have already arrived at Reno-Tahoe International Airport as of this week, and the overall plan is to give the airport more of a Lake Tahoe feel and theme. Workers will be at the airport doing their thing for at least a year, as the grand reveal isn’t expected to arrive until April of 2013.

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Travel Snapshot / Southwest / ABQ / LAS / Grand Canyon / New Mexico Travel / Nevada Travel / National Parks Travel / → All Tags

Is This the Most Spectacular Flight in the USA?

A snow-covered part of the Grand Canyon

”Why are you flying to Albuquerque?” were the words on most people’s lips last week when we told them we were cutting short a trip to Vegas to hit New Mexico.

Why Albuquerque? Well, to start with, for the flight—one of the most spectacular ones we’ve ever been on.

From Las Vegas to Albuquerque we were looking south, and got a prime view of the snow-covered high desert, mountains and miniscule trees poking out of the snow. All very beautiful, except we heard the pilot announce that “on the left, you’ll see the Grand Canyon.”

So on the way back, we swapped sides to face north, and were greeted by snow-covered mountains, snow-covered plains…and then, yeah, the Grand Canyon. We flew pretty much all the way along the Grand Canyon—from 40,000 feet we picked out the famous South Rim, less famous North Rim and, we think, possibly the West Rim, too (though we didn’t see the Skywalk).

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Travel Snapshot / Reno Travel / Nevada Travel / → All Tags

Reno Looks So Much Nicer Seen From Above

We may not have been so impressed with Reno, what with its tattoo shops-slash-wedding-chapels, but there’s no denying the landscape around aint half bad.

Here’s a view of the Reno valley – aka the Truckee Meadows, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada. Look how green it is for a desert! How lush! How beautiful!

We took this on Highway 341, which climbs up, up and up some more (as far as 6789ft at the Geiger Summit), before inching its way down to a mere 6220ft at Virginia City (which is, by the way, a delight), and then winds down to Carson City.

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Get a Tattoo, Booze and Your Wedding at the Same Reno Shop

Things that go with marriage like a horse and carriage: love. Devotion. Bravery. The barfing of your single friends out back.

Oh, and if you’re in Reno, tattoos and discount liquor and cigarettes. How romantic!

They all share a building with the Arch of Reno wedding chapel on Virginia Street. Just the kind of place you’d want to pledge your troth.

If you want something more, uhh, classic, you can go for the Antique Angel wedding chapel, a block further down. It has nice views of the Truckee River!

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Nevada Travel / Retro Travel / Travel Snapshot / Reno Travel / Las Vegas Travel / Road Trips / Road Trip Travel / → All Tags

Seeing a Different Kind of Golden Arches in Reno, Nevada

It may not be as famous as the Golden Arches, but here’s an arch we always wanted to see: “The Biggest Little City In The World” on Virginia Street in Reno.

We always wanted to go to Reno to check it out as a grubby Vegas but were sold on the idea when we came across a postcard from the 1940s of Reno, with old cars passing under this glorious arch. And we knew we really had to go.

The Reno Arch was built in 1926 in advance of the Transcontinental Highways Exposition the following year, but it was only in 1929 that the slogan was coined, after a competition (the winner got $100 for inventing the phrase).

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Travel Snapshot / Road Trips / Nevada Travel / Las Vegas Travel / Postcards / Travel Snapshots / → All Tags

Rolling Back Decades with the Postcards of Rural Nevada

So you expect things to be a little bit backward when you leave the bright lights of Vegas for the expanse of nothingness that is the Nevada desert—but 30 years backward? 40, even? That comes as a surprise.

But that's just about how old these postcards of the Las Vegas Strip are that we found on sale in Beatty, NV. Two hours northwest of Vegas on the 95, Beatty's best known for its proximity to Death Valley, its neighboring ghost town, Rhyolite, and its brothels.

What we didn't realise till we got there is just how tiny it is. Scarily tiny. Bad-things-might-happen-to-you tiny. Luckily, a Reno native had advised us to stop at the candy store, so we did. The candy store, by the way, is called Eddie's World and has a massive photo of Eddie the owner on the gas pumps outside. FYI.

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The Least Shady Part of Nevada's Famous Brothel, the Shady Lady Ranch

Much has been written about the Shady Lady Ranch, one of the most famous of the Nevada brothels and the place that played brief home to the one and only prostidude.

So you can imagine our innocent excitement when we realized that our Vegas-Reno roadtrip would not only pass several brothels, but the very Shady Lady itself.

We have no idea how the girls of the Shady Lady make a living because it is miles out in the middle of nowhere. Beatty itself is about 2 ½ hours northwest of Las Vegas, and the Shady Lady is another 31 miles north of that.

Maybe people come for the view? Because the 95, which runs pretty much parallel to Death Valley at that point (it’s just the other side of the mountains, here) is pretty spectacular.

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Nevada Travel / Road Trips / Nuclear Travel / Las Vegas Travel / → All Tags

A Different Way To Go Nuclear In Las Vegas

Nevada probably isn’t top of many people’s lists for road tripping (in fact we lived in Vegas for 18 months without ever venturing north, thinking Arizona and California were better bets), but when we had to drive from LV to San Francisco last week, we took the opportunity to make a drive we’d always thought about doing – Vegas to Reno.

One of the first things we came across on the road was the Nevada Test Site, the site of hundreds of nuclear tests from 1951-1994, just 71 miles northwest of Vegas. It's where tourists from Vegas used to be driven out to see the blasts - you could even see the mushroom clouds from Fremont Street in Downtown Vegas back in the day.

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Tourism Boards Shaking Down Everyone They Can to Get New Ad Money

Tourism board cutbacks are becoming something of a trend, as the economic crunch cascades across different parts of the public and private sectors. The news from last week is that Michigan is ending their Pure Michigan campaign, which was supposed to be a long-term effort aimed at rebranding the state, because they're out of money. We were skeptical about this project from the get-go, thinking that the money might be better spent on actually making the state pure rather than telling people it is. But that's not not why they're stopping their campaign. They're cutting back because they were unable to get money for their travel advertising the way some other boards have, by fining tourists or shaking down corporations.

The campaign for the Texas governorship now involves whether the candidates can maintain the state's tourism budget by cutting services elsewhere or raising taxes, because that's what powerful hotel and restaurant lobbies want. Those lobbies have actually been doing quite the job finding creative ways of taking money from Peter to pay for Paul's tourism ads.

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Sports Travel / Marathons / Running / Active Travel / Berlin Travel / Kauai Travel / Nevada Travel / → All Tags

Three Upcoming Marathons with Great Scenery

The real, -Berlin-Marathon

We know this is hard to hear in August when you're still barbecuing, hitting the beach and doing all those other summertime activities, but it's fall marathon training time. We found a couple of upcoming marathons that'll warm up both racers and spectators who love a good running competition in a great travel destination. Be sure to register ASAP and wear sunscreen while you're out training for these Big 3 marathons coming up:

· E.T. Full Moon Midnight Marathon
At this Nevada marathon, you just might run into E.T. About 2.5 hours north of Vegas, the course goes down Highway 375, a.k.a. Extraterrestrial Highway, which organizers say has one of the highest number of reported UFO sightings, and is right outside of Area 51. But if you see an alien, it most likely will be one of the racers, who tend to dress up for the occasion. The August 21 event includes a marathon, half-marathon, a 10K and 51K—in honor of Area 51. Online registration closes on August 19.

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