Home again, home again

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

Feels so good to be ba-a-a-ack. Thanks to all my co-conspirators for handling things while I was away, particularly the other editors here: Brad Bynum, Ashley Hennefer and Dennis Myers. Congrats to Kelley Lang who waited ’til I left to have her baby. Makes me happy to know that when I finally get hit by that bus or my son achieves 18 years, the RN&R will be in good hands.

For my part, I made a giant trip through the Midwest. My girlfriend, son and I traveled some 4,222 miles with two dogs—one of whom peed on my seat on the first day of our trip. The rest of the trip was spent saying things like, “Look at that scenery, and it hardly smells in here any more.”

Anyway, we started here in Reno, went up to Twin Falls, Idaho, up to Billings, Mont., through Yellowstone, back to Billings, down through Wyoming to Kimball, Nebr., to Lincoln, Nebr., to Falls City, Nebr., a quick trip to see the new bridge at Rulo, Nebr./Missouri, down to I-70 across Kansas to Denver, Colo., then to some little town in Utah, over to Arches National Park, and then home across Highway 50.

As you can imagine, it was more fun for the dogs than it was for my 15-year-old son who couldn’t even select the music to make his trip more interesting.

One of the main things that struck me was how very local our depressed economy is. Even in other areas of Nevada, there’s massive construction, business activity, open storefronts, the buying and selling of homes. Frankly, it’s unbelievable. I felt like that frog that got caught in the slowly heating pot of water. I knew it was bad here; I’d just forgotten what good looked like. My home sweet home city was literally the only place that wasn’t bustling.

The only other thing that struck me as hard was the fields after fields of dead corn in Nebraska. Get ready for higher food costs, particularly grain-fed meat.