Category: Travels

I beckoned my aunts (on a visit from Manila) to the waiting car as I prepped the engine for our trip to the Black Oak Indian reservation casino situated in Tuolumne, California — about 8 miles east of Sonora.

The day started on a misty note as the sun never showed up in Fremont on that Tuesday morning – Dec 14. There was a mild fog as we traversed Altamont Pass along Highway 580 as our car hummed steadily towards the low-lying plains of Tracy.

After about an hour of driving, we encountered a little drizzle along Highway 108 as we approached the town of Oakdale. Time for gas and time to relieve my bladder when we were right in the heart of Oakdale. The place is noted for its fine furniture (naturally, made of oak) as well as for being the heart of the vast and fertile valley of Central California…an area that supplies almost the entire U.S. all the almonds it needed.

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From Oakdale, it was simply 45 minutes of stress-free driving, punctuated by undulating hills and vistas that seem to know no borders. It is one of those places where you will feel the vastness and, perhaps, greatness of good, old U.S of A. As a bonus, the sun suddenly showed up as we approached the area where 108 forked into 120 –the main artery that will lead you to the majestic Yosemite National Park.

From 108, there was a new exit ramp that led to a 9-mile feeder road (mostly uphill) where the Tuolumne Band of Me-Wuk Indians situated their new gambling mecca this side of California. The place was undergoing expansion, so that we had to park in an area where you will have a view of the hills that surround the place.

Even though it was high-noon when we arrived, the place was cold — like it used to be, all throughout the season. Even the nickel and quarter slot machines we played were also cold. We were still lucky to eke out a few dollars in winnings even though we just hang around the place in under three hours.

Nothing much had changed in the place when we first set foot on it during its opening day in 2001. Except, maybe, for the hot, roast-beef sandwich (with a marvelous side dish of mashed potatoes) which we washed down with soda and coffee that was excellent.

Even that alone, was worth the drive!

 

Once more, this time with my visiting aunts in tow, we visited yet another Indian casino called Cache Creek — one of the several that had mushroomed (and continues to) around California. The drive was a leisurely one since we embarked immediately after the rush hour traffic on a Thursday morning.
In about two hours, we had already parked our car in one of the wider, blue-colored slots with the distinctive disabled logo.

It had been several years back when we first went to this relatively unknown place just about 30 miles west (if coming from the Bay Area) off Highway 80 in Vacaville. It’s in a place called Brooks and the casino itself got its gaming license by being situated in the Indian reservation long inhabited by the Rumsey Band of Wintuns or the ‘Patwins.’

I was surprised how huge the place had now gotten to be. Gone was the sleazy feeling one gets when entering the casino. It had become now a ritzy and glitzy place that will give any medium-sized upscale casino in Las Vegas a run for its money.
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If you enter the place from the south side, there will be airy restaurants that will immediately entice you with the variety of food that they offer. It used to be the area where, before, a small and cramped fast food was tucked beside a circular room where the nickel machines were located. Now, there’s an oyster bar, a deli, a fast food booth, an Asian resto, a huge taqueria, a seafood/steak house plus two huge restaurants that both offered modest buffets. How money can change the world, huh?

But the games remained the same except for the notable addition of two craps table. The tables may look the same as regular craps but look closely. In the center of the table was a port where cards were shuffled. Cards in a craps game? Yes, Indian casinos use cards to comply with the regulation that all table games must all be done using game cards. This is probably one of the deals, Las Vegas biggies had struck with Indian-gaming lobbyists, so as not to take too much of their very lucrative businesses or ‘level the playing field’, so to speak. And check out the dice, too! Those are not your standard pair of craps dice but specially made ones.

As usual, we meandered all throughout the place, hunting for any of our favorite penny slot machines. But we found no penny machines whatsoever. Do Indian casinos forego penny machines to make sure that they ‘rake it in’ quicker?
We found solace in a 10/25 cent variety that offered a modest payout even if you play only 1 or 2 coins (yes, we opted for the 10 cent game). Then, having sated our appetite for these games, we hied off to the nearby taqueria and had their luscious ‘beef taquitos‘ with ‘pico de gallo‘ as our chosen dipping. My aunts washed these down with iced-tea while I went for my usual coffee.

We went home at the break of dusk and wondered where’s the creek in the place that gave the casino its name or so it seemed. The Indians had, indeed, found a cache in the place. But it was not gold this time and the actual creek, for that matter, was not nearby the casino itself.

It was cold, hard cash being emptied out of the pockets of visitors, day-in and day-out. No wonder they had grown so big in so little time. For Cache Creek (the casino), it’s ‘ka-ching’, ‘ka-ching’, indeed!

We made an impromptu trip to Reno, NV last Saturday – after heavy rains lashed-out the Bay Area on Thursday and Friday – to pump up our sagging adrenaline levels and to try our luck in the numerous casinos there.

The trip was smooth as silk and the weather was simply spectacular. In three hours, we were already playing our favorite slot machines in Boomtown in nearby Sparks. We moved on to downtown Reno later on in the afternoon.

Reno was noticeably not particularly busy on that gorgeous weekend. The Indian casinos must have taken a very large bite out of their lucrative business. Casino habitués were not flocking to this mini “Sin City” like they used to –specially on a very nice weekend like that one.

For us, it was a welcome relief. Traffic inside the main strip was very light and going from one place to another was easy as it could get. Parking was incredibly hassle-free (specially with the use of my ‘temporarily disabled’ parking card — note: in Indian casinos, these privilege parking spaces seem to be always full) and going in and out of the casinos was without the usual hustle and bustle. In was an exceptionally relaxing weekend in an otherwise stressful place.

As an aside, we also dropped-by our favorite Filipino eatery in Vallejo – Andrea’s – where we picked-up all our food for the entire trip. These included “chicken adobo” and the saucy “beef kaldereta” with rice. For dessert, we had the “taho” (a food/drink made basically of curdled soy beans) with lots “arnibal” (syrup made of brown sugar and vanilla) and “sago” (tapioca pearls).

Of course, the package won’t be complete without their irresistible and delightfully crispy “lechon” with the mildly spicy liver sauce.

During one of our trips to the gambling mecca this side of Nevada, we usually leave the house at around 7:00 in the morning.

That normally allows us with enough time to make sure that someone had already heated up any one of our favorite nickel or penny slot machines, when we arrive. But, on this particular trip – which was on a Sunday – we left the house two hours earlier than the usual.

We’ll be driving much slower and will try to cover more secondary roads on selected cities and towns along the way. Armed with my relic-of-the dot-com-bust but still-trusty, WiFi-equipped notebook, a booster antenna and the notoriously popular wireless sniffer, NetStumbler, we’ll be war driving from Fremont to Reno, Nevada.

The rapid popularity of wireless Internet access spawned the fine art of war driving: a computer cracking technique that involves driving through a neighborhood with a wireless-enabled notebook computer and mapping houses and businesses that have wireless access points. There are states that deem this practice illegal. But not in these two tech-savvy states of California and Nevada — homes to Silicon Valley and the Comdex Expos.

But why war drive? It is because of my distaste for cell phones. While cell phones are convenient for emergencies, non-yakkers like me want to have Internet access – the world at your fingertips – as we drive along. The tiny screens in cell phones and other WiFi-enabled gadgets like the Palm Tungsten C just don’t compare to the full-glory of a big, crisp 12″ or 14″ TFT computer screen.

We utilized the I-580 East to 205 to I-5 North to 120 to CA-99 to Highway 80 East route to reach Reno, Nevada and in the course of the almost  4 and a half hours of leisurely cruising/war driving, I had concluded that it is not only indispensable to bring your notebook computer if you will embark on a long-haul drive but it also a convenient way to get in touch with the world – all for free… while giving your tired eyes a lot of relief! The world is indeed a small place with the Internet and WiFi access. Access points abound – except for the major portion of the uphill stretch from Placerville to Sparks – in most of the areas we drove by!

However, in time, war driving may suffer the same fate as using your cell phones while you’re driving — which is now widely implemented in densely populated cities — unless, a highly secure and selective encryption standard will come along the way. One that will be good enough to sort out the free-for-public-use wireless networks from the private ones.

—links:

www.macstumbler.com
www.netstumbler.com
www.palmone.com

I was feeling bored that I decided to make the four hours plus drive to Lake Tahoe, to take a breather.

After three days of revamping this site, the occasional tweaking of all the computers in the house and my fix-your-PC moonlighting, I had it for a while. After all, it had just been just quite a while since I updated/revised my (this) site. That third revision was easier, since most of the images were already done – from the previous two versions. My initial site and its subsequent revision were both hosted at Philippine-based servers. After I setup my own server, I thought that making any major revisions to one’s site will seem to be all too easy – I was wrong!

I noticed a smaller volume of traffic going to Tahoe specially on a weekend. Usually, the traffic is a little tighter – specially on a Friday – since the folks with RVs normally start their weekend jaunts early. Not so these days. Maybe the Indian casinos had really taken a deep bite into the business of the usual casino haunts like Reno, Tahoe and even, Las Vegas.

We arrived a with a little bit of sunlight to spare and immediately grabbed a quick bite at our favorite 24 hr. cafe inside the Horizon – – the spicy buffalo wings is always on our to-order list.

Afterwards, it was back to Harvey’s, where we played our favorite nickel and penny slots…way until the early hours of Saturday.