Category: West

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California Girls

I’ve been playing “California Girls” in my head now for a couple of weeks. Sometimes I play the classic Beach Boys version and sometimes I hum the David Lee Roth with those lascivious leers added to the chorus. I’m just glad after all that ear-worming that I still like the song.

“California Girls” started playing because tomorrow we go to Northern California, north of Redding. I’ve been to California quite a bit, but I’ve never been north of the Wine Country, and I’ve never fished anywhere.

If everybody had an ocean
Across the U.S.A.
Then everybody’d be surfin’
Like Californ-i-a

Did you know that “Surfin’ USA” is actually Bryan Wilson lyrics set to the tune of “Sweet Little Sixteen” by Chuck Berry? I didn’t, but it seems an apt metaphor for California. The state is this amazing thing in and of itself, with the Pacific on the left and the Sierra Nevadas on the right, beautiful, interesting, and grandly diverse, both geographically and culturally. In the far south there are the deserts and beaches. In the far north there are redwoods and mountains and trout.

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But a big part of California seems imported from elsewhere: Joni Mitchell, “Sweet Little Sixteen,” the Gold Rush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Dodgers and the Giants, the movie industry, surfing, Tom Joad . . . . Even its geology is a mash-up from the ocean floor and marauding island crescents. You may not recall this, but until geologists invented tectonic plates in the 60s, California was completely flat. There wasn’t any elevated ground in the whole state, and it was number 3 on the list of our flattest states. Then the geologists got creative and overnight California had all those mountains. Tectonic plates are really what made California what it is today.

Lucille Lloyd, detail of Queen Califa Mural, 1937, California State Capitol.

Even California’s name is borrowed. It’s the name of an island of black Amazonian women described in the 1510 Spanish novel, Las sergas de Esplandián. The Californian amazons fed their males to the gryphons that they rode into battle.

All of California’s geological shifting still left the Central Valley flat as a pancake. It extends from Bakersfield in the south to Lake Shasta in the far north. About half of the fruits and vegetables produced in the United States are produced in the Central Valley. I’m not aware of any trout in the valley, though I’d expect there to be some bass ponds, and almost certainly some carp. We’ll be fishing north of there, just a bit up Highway 5, within sight of Mount Shasta, elevation 14,179. Mount Shasta was formed in 1967 by a group of geologists from Stanford.

Geologic Map of California, California Geological Survey. Red and green are tall, yellow isn’t. The blue off to the left is sea level.

California makes me wish I knew something about geology. Obviously I don’t.

California has approximately 39 million people, about 10 million more than second place Texas. The largest centers of population are coastal, centered on Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego, and in the Central Valley. There aren’t a lot of people in the deserts or the mountains.

There’s no dominant ethnic group. About 35% of the population is white alone, 6.5% black, 16% Asian, and 40% Hispanic. About 35% of the population is college educated, and 84% have high school degrees, which is pretty close to the national average and close enough to Texas to make no difference. The median income is about $84,000, ranked number 5, and 12% of the population lives in poverty. That poverty rate places it in the solid center of states.

Cost of living in California is roughly 135% of the national average, and only Massachusetts and Hawaii are more expensive. There are earthquakes, fires, the decline of San Francisco, droughts, and the Dodgers. In only a few 100s of millions of years the California coast will slam into Asia, and no one seems the least bit worried.

Alta California, one of the names for Spanish and Mexican California before it was ceded to the States, was first settled in 1804, but wasn’t really ever much of a thing. In 1840 before the Mexican-American War, the non-native population of California is estimated at 8,000. There had been a sizable and diverse Native American population before the Europeans, with as many as 200,000 Native Americans, about 12% of the total estimated population for the U.S. There were more than 100 tribal groups. By 1870, because of death and removal, the California Native American population had declined to about 12,000.

California’s population boomed with the Gold Rush, reaching 379,994 by 1860. In some ways the Gold Rush seems nothing but a footnote, but it really is the seminal event in California history. The state hasn’t stopped growing since.

California has a reputation of left-leaning politics, but that’s shifted back and forth over the years. Ronald Reagan, after all, was from California. Since World War II, there’s been a Democratic governor for 32 years and a Republican governor for 42, but currently the state is very Democratic. All of the elected state officials are Democrats, Both Senators are Democratic, and only 12 of the 62-member congressional delegation are Republican. The California State legislature is overwhelmingly Democratic. In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried California 61.7% to 31.6%, and in 2020, Joe Biden carried 63.5% of the California vote. Trump’s percentage increased to 34.32%, but the total vote in 2020 increased by about 3.9 million. In 2020 most of the urban and coastal areas voted for Biden, while portions of the Central Valley and the far north voted Trump.

2020 California Presidential Election Map by County, Wikipedia.

Besides surfing (which was an import from Hawaii), California gives us our movies, a lot of music, our wine, and our computers. It is the largest economy in the U.S., and would rank 5th in the world if it were a separate nation. Oil production, defense industries, agriculture, solar power . . . The Port of Los Angeles imports approximately 20% of the cargo coming into the States, with the most imports coming from Asia.

To prepare for our trip to California, Kris and I came up with a list of movies set in California. It’s an endless list, and we’ll catch a fish long before we run out of movies. We watched Vertigo, but we didn’t get around to The Birds. We watched Clueless, but never got around to re-watching American Graffiti. We watched The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but not Chinatown.

Wasn’t Back to the Future set in a California suburb? I think I’ll stop this and go watch Chinatown. Or maybe Big Trouble in Little China.

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Joe Rogers’ Photos

Joe Rogers, image copyrighted, used with permission.

To see more of Joe Rogers” photos, go here.

Critics generally agree that this is the best photo Joe Rogers will ever take:

Ok, that’s if you confine critics to the two people in the photo who live at our house. Joe took photos at our wedding. He also took photos of our children when they were small. My parents hired Joe for both, because they thought the world of Joe. They told me that very thing so often, frankly, that I was just a wee bit jealous.

Joe has a photography business. He takes photos of weddings, and of families, and if we needed an important photo, we went to Joe. He is a photographer in a pretty small town. There are other photographers there, but we went to Joe.

Joe is older than me, somewhere fewer than 10 years older, somewhere more than five. He was enough older that while I knew of him, I didn’t know him. I knew Joe’s wife, Becky, better than Joe. She was only a couple of years older than me, and we overlapped both in high school and at the University of Texas. As I recall, she worked for a time in Austin television news after she graduated. How did I know this? We were from a pretty small town, and you just know things. She was a smart, personable, pretty girl, and I’m certain she still is. When Becky married Joe it was a bit of a topic among my friends.

Joe Rogers, image copyrighted, used with permission.

At some point long ago I realized that Joe was taking photos of cowboys. This wouldn’t make sense in a lot of places, but out of my small high school class, I always say that three of us ended up lawyering, and three of us ended cowboying, but I’m probably undercounting the cowboys. Ranching and beef production in that part of the world make cowboys real. On ranches, at large animal vet clinics, at the stockyards and sale barn, there are cowboys. I expect that our high school is still turning out as many cowboys as it turns out lawyers.

Joe’s cowboy photos were ranch photos. To me they aren’t romantic photos, they’re not nostalgic photos, but photos of what most draws me to any photo of men doing hard physical work; their intensity, their effort, their skill . . . As often as not Joe’s photos seem like glimpses of a larger picture: a glove, a group of men on a rail, a man’s back in a steel pipe corral, all of those bits in the photo speaking to everything going on when the photo was taken.

Just to be clear, photos of guys lawyering don’t have nearly the same punch as photos of guys cowboying.

Joe Rogers, Taos Pueblo, New Mexico, image copyrighted, used with permission.

I assume no one paid Joe to take cowboy photos, though I hope he’s made some money from them, and that he’s received recognition for them. Me, I have no skill for photography, even though like everybody else with a smart phone I take too many photos. What I realize, though, is that my rare decent photo is mostly luck. That’s less true for Kris, she has a pretty good eye, and most of the photos I steal are Kris’s. Joe though makes a living taking photos. He has not just a good eye, but honed skill.

During a now long-ago Houston mayor’s race, the race when Annise Parker was first elected mayor, a friend suggested that I get on Facebook so I could follow the campaign–Facebook was still new for most of us, and in those earlier days there was a lot of useful information, or at least gossip. Political campaigns largely run on gossip. I was on Annise’s finance committee, and was more intensely engaged than I probably should have been, so I signed up for Facebook. Funny thing though, not long after I signed up I had 50 or 60 friends, most of them not from Houston, but from my far away and long-abandoned hometown.

Joe Rogers, Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, image copyrighted, used with permission.

That reconnection has been for me a joy. I don’t really have any ties there now, but thanks to Facebook I can see my classmates’ grandkids, keep track of their anniversaries and birthdays, and too frequently mourn their losses. I can also time the arrival of Houston’s next cold front by watching for snow photos from Vernon. It’s usually about a 24 to 36 hour lag, but the snow doesn’t often make it this far.

Through Facebook and mutual friends I somehow connected with Joe, and I liked him. I usually agree with what he says, and he posts great photos. Most are of the Southwest: Utah, Colorado, and of course New Mexico. At one point Joe posted a photo of doorways in Pueblo Bonito at Chaco Canyon. I had been there twice. I had looked through those doorways. I could not have imagined that photo.

Shiprock, New Mexico, Joe Rogers, image copyrighted, used with permission.

Joe is a professional photographer, but he also takes photos as an avocation. I’ve been amused at the number of my friends and colleagues who have recently published books, or have announced that they’re writing books. Lawyers suffer under a curse. We write for a living. The best lawyers are excellent writers, and care for the craft. At the same time, most of our writing is ephemeral and narrowly confined both as to audience and purpose. I suspect that this rash of literary output by aging lawyers–and I’ll throw this blog into the rash–is in part because old habits die hard and in part because we want to leave something behind besides a finely crafted and long-forgotten contract clause. That and we find it hard to stop talking.

I think Joe’s impulse though is different. Getting ready to drive to New Mexico, I’ve thought a lot about Joe’s photos of the West, photos of red sandstone slot canyons in Utah, of a solitary fly fisher on the Frying Pan near Aspen, of those doorways in Chaco Canyon. I say too often that there are two kinds of Texans, Texans who vacation in Santa Fe and Texans who vacation in New Orleans, and Joe is clearly on the Santa Fe side of the ledger. Maybe a part of that difference arises from a small town sensibility, that for small town and country folk the difference between, say, New Orleans and Oklahoma City, is too subtle for us to be strongly drawn to one over the other. They’re both cities, and their charms, difficulties, and mysteries are, frankly, more of a kind than folk more attuned to urban subtleties can imagine. The difference between driving a country road in Western New Mexico and in the Panhandle, now there’s variety. Landscapes are something to ponder and appreciate.

Joe Rogers, colorized detail of a New Mexico church, image copyrighted, used with permission.

And for Westerners, the western landscape is infinitely magnificent. I guess that Joe’s impulse is different in part because Joe’s not merely trying to beat the clock. He’s taken his photos for most of a lifetime. I’m sure like all of us he’s imagined other lives, of writing a novel or cowboying or lawyering or whatever, but as a town photographer he’s taken not just excellent wedding photos, but he’s stayed close to the places that define the West. His eye is on the West, and he’s been kind enough to share what he sees.

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Reno, Nevada Packing List

What We Took

If you’re fishing with a good guide he will have good equipment, and dragging rods and reels and flies to the Territory almost seems pretentious. Still, we do. We took Kris’s 8 weight, my 7 weight, and two 5 weights. We took 5 weights for the Truckee River, and never took them out of the luggage. We fished the 7 and 8 weights some the second day. We took 250 grain and 350 grain and intermediate sinking lines, which we didn’t use, and floating lines, standard trout lines, which we did use but which we didn’t like as much as the guide’s Orvis Bank Shot lines.

Maybe we drag stuff because of familiarity, but I suspect it’s mostly pride of possession. Part of the fun of fly fishing is the esoteric gear, the rod cases, the well-made reels, the lines, and most of all the small bits of fur and feather, and there is always the notion that even with a guide we may sneak off to fish for a quiet evening and need our own stuff.

I tied flies for the trip and never touched them, and I felt bad about it, but it was my fault. They weren’t bad flies, either. At least the balanced leaches will be used. And the worms, but I won’t admit that I’ll use the worms.

I hate tying those squirmy things, not because I’m squeamish but because the squirmy part won’t stay straight. They also melt if they get Super Glue on them. Aiden at Reno Fly Shop said he now ran them through a bead head that he then ran onto a barbless hook. He never touched them with thread.

Casinos

I had never been into a casino. Some people find that odd, but there are none in Texas, and I never went out of my way to get to one when I traveled. I don’t understand the attraction of gambling. If I lose I hate losing and if I win I only feel lucky, not skilled. We looked around the Reno Circus Circus, which I hope is the worst casino in the world, because if it’s the best I’m baffled. This wasn’t James Bond playing baccarat, it was just kind of dismal. A friend said that he loves casinos because even though he doesn’t gamble he loves the people watching, and that the dismal is the point. He says that you can measure how upscale a casino is by the height of ladies’ heels: when you get to the place with stilt-like stilettos you’re in the upscale casino. I didn’t notice the heels in Circus Circus, but my guess is they were pretty flat.

Restaurants

We had one memorable meal, Louis Basque Kitchen, where Kris had the sweetbreads and I had the lamb. Everything was served family style at communal tables, though you ordered your entree. It was great fun, and one of the high school football coaches sitting next to us said that when we went to California we should hire his nephew at AC Fly Fishing as a guide. He was really proud of his nephew, and how could we now use anyone else? When we get to Redding it’s Anthony at AC Fly Fishing for us.

There’s a lovely French place, Beaujolais Bistro where we ate Friday, and I like a lovely French place. The last night we shared prom night in the suburbs at a place called Twisted Fork. The best part of Twisted Fork was the prom dresses and, oddly, the boys’ hair. Boys’ hair in Reno in prom night is magnificently well-coiffed.

There’s a surprising number of German bakeries in Reno. We went to one, The results were excellent. They also have a restaurant and a dance floor.

Pronunciation Guide

Nə-væ-də, as in banana, not Nə-vah-də, as in Prada or nada or whatever, the “what” part. In Spanish it means “snow covered.” I’m pretty sure that the correct Spanish pronunciation is not Nə-væ-də, but I’m from Houston, and you should hear the old-timers here pronounce San Felipe, or New Yorkers pronounce Houston. If you say Nə-vah-də then Nə-væ-dəns will cringe. At Louis Basque Corner it was the first thing our communal table mates told us. I have to admit that here in Houston Sæn Fɪl-ɪ-pee has pretty much gone by the wayside. I’m sad to see it go, so I’ll try to say Nə-væ-də.

Playlist

Crime Novels

I looked for mystery novels set in Nevada, but couldn’t find anything I liked. There were plenty of mystery novels, but the crimes were so despicably unpleasant that I couldn’t stomach them. I don’t think that’s an accident. What other kind of crime could get any attention in Nevada? I decided that the appropriate crimes for Nevada would be blackmail and theft. The threat of something not staying in Vegas, either secrets or money, might be pretty believable. All these serial killers get old.

Playlist

I found two musicians from Nevada, an operatic mezzo-soprano, Emma Zajick, and Panic! At the Disco!. I liked the opera singer.

So instead of native born music I listened mostly to songs that mention Reno or Las Vegas, and Vegas Acts. There are a lot of songs that mention Vegas.

Louis Prima
  • Sheryl Crow, “Leaving Las Vegas.” I liked the 80s, and nobody says the 80s like Sheryl Crow.
  • Sara Bareilles, “Vegas.” I didn’t know this song, or Sara Bareilles. Apparently it was kind of a big deal when it was first released. Its a good song.
  • Panic! At the Disco, “Vegas Lights.” I guess this the kind of music Vegas would produce if left to its own devices.
  • Emmylou Harris, Gram Parsons, Cowboy Junkies “Ooh Las Vegas.” Things always go better with Emmylou Harris, Gram Parsons, and the Cowboy Junkies.
  • Elvis Presley, “Viva Las Vegas.” This song needs an exclamation point after Viva!
Heinrich Klaffs, Johnny Cash, Bremen, 1972.

Songs that mention Reno are different I think. They are generally stranger.

  • Johnny Cash, “Folsom Prison Blues.” This is one of the great songs, it’s impossible to say “Reno” without thinking “I shot a man . . .” There are actually two mysteries about the song. First, why would shooting a man in Reno, Nevada, put somebody in prison in a California prison? The usual internet answer is that the singer also committed a crime in California. Second, why would a train going through California end up in San Antonio? That’s one long haul. I figure these mysteries are like the creation of the world in seven days: poetic truth doesn’t need to be literal, and neither God nor poets are confined to mere facts.
  • REM, “All the Way to Reno.“
  • The Stone Foxes, “Reno.” I learned from this song that Casinos are built without windows.
  • Dottie West, “Reno.” This has nothing to do with the city.
  • Jonathan Richman, “Reno.” I thought this the best of the lot, except he doesn’t go fishing.
  • The Whiskey Gentry, “Reno.” You now know almost as much as I do.
  • Bruce Springsteen, “Reno.” This is the worst song Bruce Springsteen ever wrote. It’s about the additional price a prostitute charges for anal sex. I suspect Springsteen likes to write about places, and he’s good at it, but in Nə-væ-də he ran into the same problem the mystery novels run into: run-of-the-mill grittiness just don’t signify. So he wrote this. He shouldn’t have.
  • Beck, “Loser.” “I’m a loser baby/So why don’t you kill me.” That may be the strangest ear worm ever written.
  • Grateful Dead, “Friend of the Devil.”

And then there are the lounge acts: Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Frank Sinatra, Charo, Liberace, Celine Dion, Lois Prima, Bobby Darin, Wayne Newton, Elton John. There are some great songs in this songbook, “That Old Black Magic,” “Mambo Italiano,” “Everybody Loves Somebody,” “Fly Me to the Moon,” “I’ll Never Smile Again,” and the first time I listened through it I was so excited, and the second time I was a little weary with much of it, and on the third day I wondered who ever listened to a steady diet of this? And Celine Dion, what’s up with that? We never made it through a single Celine Dion song, and she’s been in Vegas for 17 years straight. Celine Dion will never be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame because she will still be playing Vegas.

I promise Kris that when Celine came through Houston on her new world tour I’d get tickets. Man was Kris excited.

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We Visited the Pyramids and Posed on the Camel, April 12-13, 2019

First things first, I caught a fish, but unfortunately Kris didn’t. Actually, I caught two fish, one was a Summit Lahontan cutthroat that probably weighed two pounds. The other was a Pilot Peak Lahontan cutthroat that weighed about five pounds. Those are goodly trout for anyplace else, and they were fun to catch, but I gather they are on the small side for Pyramid Lake.

Kris meanwhile never had a fish take a fly. It was nothing she did wrong. She was casting well, and while the fishing is unique, and while we wouldn’t have figured it out on our own, with a good guide it’s not hard.  We were fishing with Casey Gipson out of Reno, and Casey was all the good things a good guide should be. He had good equipment, including excellent ladders. He was patient with the birds nests we made of our leaders. He kept us at plausible locations out of the crowds. When he picked us up at the hotel he had coffee. Coffee is no small thing.

He is also a great cook. You wouldn’t think that was so important, but shows what you know. We had homemade chorizo po’boys for lunch the first day and homemade chicken burritos the second. Whatever else happened, we had great food. And coffee.

Casey’s photo. I’m the model. I’m not really sleeping. Really.

But the fishing was slow. What we kept trying to explain to Casey was that this was just a normal fishing trip with the Thomases. Unless you know that the Thomases are going to be there, April may be the best time to fish Pyramid. If we’re there the fish will be down for our visit. Honestly, except for the nap I took on the bank the second day, we fished hard, we fished reasonably well, and I didn’t hurt anybody with my casting.

Casey told us that the worst fishing days on Pyramid are the nicest days, the days when the barometric pressure is high, the breezes are gentle, and the lake is glass. The best days to fish are the days when the weather is the worst. We had nice days, beautiful days, the days of the first morning of the world. Casey worked his butt off, but what can you do? It’s easy to guide when all you have to do is net and release fish. Poor Casey had to answer all the questions we came up with because we weren’t busy, plus come up with stories to keep us engaged. Nobody ever said guiding was easy.

We had planned to fish one day on the Pyramid and one on the Truckee River, the river that carries water from Lake Tahoe down to Pyramid Lake, but the Truckee flows were dangerously high, around 6,000 cubic feet per second. Our Reno hotel room window looked down on the Truckee, and we constantly checked the river, hopeful, but then had hopes washed away. The river was dashing and carrying on and generally taunting us. It was one whole lot of silted, roiling, angry water. I’m sure most weekends it it’s the gentlest bubbling brook, perfect for a three weight bamboo rod and size 18 quill Gordons.

The first day in Nevada we drove up the Sierra Nevada to Lake Tahoe, and the last day we drove to Silver City. Both are classic Western alpine environments, formed by tectonic pressures that jumbled igneous rock into dramatic poses. There are pine trees and winding mountain roads and when it snowed on our drive to Tahoe we sang “Snow” from White Christmas. Pyramid though is different.  It’s also dramatic, but in an Old Testament Biblical sort of way. It looks like where Moses and the Hebrews spent their 40 years in the Wilderness.  

And there are no trees, but of course that didn’t stop me from getting my fly snagged in sagebrush. There are rocks, but the rocks aren’t the product of geologic cataclysm. The rocks are tufa deposits, a deposit of carbonate minerals like what accumulates around old plumbing where the water’s hard. Sometimes the deposits are rounded and lumpish, sometimes striated like something shattered and sharp and broken. The color of the deposits matches the sand and the sagebrush; tan, grey, barren, and dry. 

The lake is on the Pyramid Lake Paiute reservation, and the fishing season is from October to the end of June. It’s huge, 28 miles long and nine miles across, but the air is so clear and dry that distances are confusing. It looks like it’s two instead of nine miles across. In the warmer months fishing is closed and other uses take over. Casey thought that the tribe closed the fishing season as much to prevent conflicts between jet skiers and anglers as for conservation.

Other than the big tufa rock, the lake shore (and the lake bed) is course sand and small broken rock, a beach perfect for summer recreation. There’s plenty of sage brush, but not much else. The near lake floor is a series of shelves, and you can see the pattern repeated on the shore. Shelf, drop, shelf, drop. The trout cruise the drops, and Casey planted our ladders about 15 feet from the shore at the first drop’s edge. Now Casey is a big ‘ol boy, but it’s height not girth.  He’s 6’8”, and Kris (who’s 5’4”) distrusted his awareness of relativity.  He did ok though, and she never drowned nor even dunked, much. Casey said that the key to excellent ladder placement was to never wade out past his wader belt, which was not quite to the top of Kris’s waders. 

When we fished, we first climbed the ladder, and then cast out 30 feet or so to get beyond the drop to the feeding fish.  There be monsters.  When there were no fish in the first hours, Casey had me prospect with streamers on a sinking line. I’d let the line sink and then retrieve with short strips. Other than that we fished nymphs under fluorescent Screw-Ball Indicators.  Casey said that streamers are generally fished in the fall, and nymphs are fished the rest of the season, and we fished big weighted nymphs: mahalos, holographic midges, red red and more red chironomids. Ok, they weren’t always red, just mostly. 

There was no real retrieve on the nymphs. The shifting lake current and the wind carried the indicator and nymphs through a drift, and from time to time you might give the line a twitch to jig the flies or an up-current mend to get slack out of your line. Sometimes the drift went left to right, sometimes right to left, sometimes straight toward you. Then you’d cast and watch the drift again. Then you’d cast and watch the drift again. Then you’d do all of that some more. It was oddly mesmerizing, watching the bobber work through the waves.

If the fishing is on then the fish take is quick and strong. Casey said that when you see the indicator go down, that with a really large fish there will be no retrieve: it’s a full stop, like hooking a rock that commences a fight.  

I fished a lot of different rods, mostly 7-weights, some of ours, some of Casey’s. I fished for a while with Casey’s 11-foot two-handed rod using roll casts, and Casey said that Spey rods and switch rods were pretty much all he personally uses on the lake anymore. I liked it for a bit, but then got distracted and my roll cast went to play the slots back in Reno. I went back to single-handed rods. I’m better at daydreaming with single hand rods.

I asked Kris if we needed to go back to Nevada to catch her a fish. So far she’s caught fish everywhere I’ve caught fish except Mississippi and Nevada, but Nevada is a strange place, and it was a hard trip for a long weekend. I think she’s decided that this fish in every state business is mine, not hers, and while she likes going along she doesn’t need to catch a fish. I still need to go to Oxford, Mississippi though, even though I caught a fish in Mississippi. She didn’t catch a fish in Mississippi, but I could use that as an excuse to go again. Maybe Nevada falls into the same category.