There will be 3 parts to my Reno/Sparks posts. This first post will cover some basic stay details and an overview. The next post will cover our Grandson Ronan and our time with Patrick and Mysha. The third post will give a few photos and details of our visits with our friends there.
After a one night stopover in Elko, we arrived in the Reno/Sparks area for our extended stay on July 1. We booked a spot at our preferred area RV Park, Sparks Marina RV Park, and stayed there the entire month of July. The location is convenient, pretty central to all of Sparks and Reno, with nice shopping and amenities close by. While the RV Park itself is not super high end, it does all the basics well and the sites are just large enough to entertain outdoors, which is always important, but particularly so during these COVID times. Normally the month of July is “Art-town” for Reno with wonderful music, shows, local art, and other festivities but it was basically cancelled for obvious reasons.
The Reno area is our legal domicile as we lived there full time for 18 years, and our son Patrick lives there with his wife Mysha and our grandson Ronan. Also many of our best friends live there, so this area really is home for us. And in addition to our long time friends who live there, we also had our new friends Mike & Bridgette Lancaster meet us there for a couple of weeks. They are also full timers (or are about to be) in a beautiful Newmar London Aire, which is a step up luxury wise from our Newmar Dutch Star (which is still a fabulous rig).
After a month at Sparks Marina we moved over to the RV Park at GSR (Grand Sierra Resort). GSR is a casino/resort in the middle of Reno. We stay there in part when we have friends coming in from out of town, which in this case were our Sacramento based best buds, Rich & Dominic. While Dom & Rich were there a reunion of sorts was set up from our river cruise last October. Jim & Ruthie Garaventa hosted a quasi pot luck in their backyard for those of us in the area who were on the cruise. Darren Krok also flew up for a couple of days from Phoenix, but we were still staying at Sparks Marina at the time.
We did not enjoy the GSR RV Park as much as Sparks Marina, but it was still fine. We will only stay there in the future if we have out of town friends staying the the hotel there.
We left GSR on August 11 and moved over to the RV Park at Gold Ranch. Gold Ranch is right at the Nevada/California border just off I-80. This was our first stay at this park and it is spacious and has more of a camping feel than the city central places. It is about 15 miles west of downtown Reno, and there isn’t much in the local area. So extra driving is required almost no matter where you go, but at least the traffic is very light. Otherwise the park is very nice with large spots and is right next to the mountains with some great hiking right near by. This was hampered some by the wildfires which had started in mid-August and made everything so smoky any outdoor activities were tough. We finally left the are August 26 already missing our friends and family, and looking forward to our next stay.
Bakers Be Gone 