Northline Walking Journal - Cal Neva

Unfortunately, I was not able to have a meal on the Cal Neva Top Deck Restaurant as I had limited funds for the weekend (a.k.a I'm a broke a** college kid) however I managed  to snap a picture of the exterior when walking with Miles and Austin on a verrrryyyyyy coooooollllld Thursday night.

Admittedly, I have never been inside the casino but I distinctly remember as a child always thinking how cool it was that they combined California and Nevada and made it into a casino name in Reno. Another confession, I honestly never paid much attention to its existence until now. I always saw it as one casino in a horde of others that sprinkle different sections of Reno. It's strange how you grow up so close to a certain area, yet you only see it as the big picture while taking for granted all of the bits and pieces that build the picture.

 

Regarding the two physicists who visited Kronberg Castle in Denmark who wrote:

“Isn't it strange how this castle changes as soon as one imagines that Hamlet lived here?”

This is exactly what happened to me when finally seeing the Cal Neva for the first time.

Instead of just seeing it as the Cal Neva Casino of Reno, I saw it as the Cal Neva Casino in the book Northline by Willy Vlautin and imagined the characters ordering their food in the Top Deck Restaurant at exactly the same time as I was looking at the casino (and how creepy that would be on my part). How would the characters react to Reno in its present state? Was there really so much that was different back then? Could 1999 even be considered "back then" yet? Regardless, this opened my mind to many things that I may have overlooked in Reno.