Birthday celebrations!

For the first part of Dan's 25th birthday celebration, we went out to the Peppermill Casino. The Peppermill is an enormous fantastical casino that puts the cute retro casinos to shame. The entire first floor was completely covered in flourescent lights

The first floor also had a really cool fish bar! The walls of the bar were completely made out of fish tanks. The picture below is a really lame attempt to look like one of the Peppermill fish.

After exploring the first floor, we picked one of the restaurants in the Peppermill for dinner. The upstairs floor was much more elegant and relaxed. Our waitress was incredibly nice and brought Dan a piece of cake free of charge to wish him a happy birthday.

Fish face for the fish bar

Birthday cake

Bright lights everywhere!

After dinner, we grabbed a cab back to the hotel. Our cab driver pulled up in front of our hotel and was harassed by two men standing outside about the gentlemen's club advertisement on the top of his car. The man laughed and said in a thick southern accent "is that some kind of titty bar?" Our cab driver responded in his Indian accent, "your mother dances at that bar. . . idiot."

First Day- Reno, NV

This is the first post from our adventures out west and the drive across the country back home to Pittsburgh, PA. Dan spent the summer working in Reno and we met up there on a late Thursday night for the first leg of the trip.

We checked out the Reno strip during the day, which is filled to the brim with retro casinos and quickie wedding chapels. We happened to be in Reno during the Hot August Nights festival. From what we could tell, Hot August Nights draws massive amounts of people from all over the country who want to display and admire retro cars. The cars looked right at home on the Reno strip.  

Under the famously awesome "Reno Arch." Reno Trivia!: The original arch was built in the 1920s to commemorate the new transcontinental highways. Not wanting to tear down the arch after the event, city officials decided to redesign the arch instead, holding a slogan contest to determine what to put on the arch. "Reno, the biggest little city in the world" won the contest has appeared on the various incarnations of the arch over the years.

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Hot August Nights!! 

Old cars on the Reno strip.

Dan on the strip in front of the Horseshoe casino and a Hot August Nights car.

This is one of many wedding chapels in Reno.

The cops from Reno 911!!

This is the Truckee river, which flows through Reno. 

The water was really cold, so we just dangled our feet in to cool off. Dan says its because the water is all ice melt from the mountain.