First Thanksgiving

The first Thanksgiving I had in Nevada was spent while on a required field trip during my first semester as a grad student, a long time ago. The field trip was the third in a series of three, and although a lot of the married students really complained about their family obligations, there weren't many of them, and our old professor was quite set in his ways.

So, off we went, to southern Nevada, spending the entire Thanksgiving break on a geology field trip. There were several highlights of the trip, one of which is a famous outcrop in Death Valley, which MJC Rocks at Geotripper posted about some time ago, and another of which was a poker game inside tents near Lake Mead.

What I remember best, though, was eating Thanksgiving dinner at the only place open in Beatty on Thanksgiving Day, the old Exchange Club, which may not be open anymore. The Exchange Club sits at the main intersection or corner in Beatty, where Highway 95 makes a turn to the east if you are headed south toward Vegas from Tonopah or Goldfield.

That dinner was my first Thanksgiving dinner in Nevada, and my first Thanksgiving dinner in a casino (fortunately there haven't been too many of those). The dinner was okay, but that's the only time I've ever eaten in a restaurant where a "C" rating from the health department was so prominently displayed.

The second most memorable thing about Thanksgiving in Beatty: we stayed that night in the Beatty dump, sleeping on the ground. Now, this wasn't the infamous Beatty Dump - though many jokes have been made - just the local landfill.

Here's hoping that your Thanksgiving dinner will be a bit more inspiring than that first one, and that you will have a better place to sleep.

Not the Beatty dump - it's just any old mine dump in Nevada.