What About Winnemucca?

A search gave me no Tiki Central hits for Winnemucca, Nevada. I was wondering if anyone here has checked the town out.

Friends and I drove through ("...along a dusty Winnemucca road...", of course) several times in the late 80s but we never stopped. At the time I wasn't into drinkin', smokin', honky tonkin' or gamblin'. (In other words: I hadn't been shown the light by the likes of you all.)

As I recall Winnemucca had quite a few casinos, most of them trying to look somewhat flashy in a small way. (The town had humorous signs along the highways leading to it...Winnemucca: If you don't stop, who will?) Because of Winnemucca's location it seems possible the casinos would have made some attempt to lure people from neighboring states who didn't want to head all the way to Reno or Las Vegas.

For years I've wanted to make a side trip there while visiting friends in Idaho, but those same friends have never been enthusiastic about the idea.

The dream, of course, is to find some joints that time forgot and the remodeling crews never visited. And maybe some undiscovered bit of exotica.

But since gambling has become more popular in recent years I'd guess most of the Winnemucca properties have been neutered into well behaved brightly lit big bland hellholes. (Cactus Pete's in Jackpot, near the Idaho border, more or less looks nothing like the picture of it on pg 49 of Tiki Modern. The only thing I found of interest in the place was a postcard with the above mentioned picture.)

I have often wondered about Winnemucca. You could board a train there and be in San Fran in time for a tiki bar crawl. And if train transportation comes back due to oil prices, that'll be a plus. I sometimes fixate on place I've never been to and try to assemble strong arguments in their favor, the quirkier the better. I was on a big Winnemucca kick for a while, then I asked some Parrotheads from Reno about it and they said it was lame. It seemed to me like city folks calling a country town "provincial." I mean, well, yeah, it would be, relatively, wouldn't it.

Actually I think brothels might be a big deal up there. Talk about a business for which tiki theming would work...

I saw no tiki aspect to Winnemucca in my internet explorations of it. There's a Basque restaurant, though, which strikes me as a bit exotic. By the way, I'm near Laughlin, NV.

Now I'm on a Glasgow, Montana kick. I have even subscribed to the local newspaper from there. It's on the train line; you can overnight to/from Seattle. It is near gigantic Fort Peck lake, big fishing territory. Boating, fishing, and stuff like that -- they're not explicitly tiki, but they have that tangential affinity to tiki, in my mind at least.