Break times at conferences can be fairly predictable—a quick trip to the restroom, then over to the spread of coffee and pastries to chat with your fellow conferees, followed by a return the meeting room and the business at hand. All highly functional, of course, but not always enough to get the juices flowing again.
Reno has an alternative: Try adding sunlight, water, hip waders and a fly-fishing rod to your next break or lunch hour. That’s right, you can walk to the Truckee River and go fly-fishing in the middle of downtown Reno, surrounded by an appealing combination of skyline and high-desert mountain scenery. It seems like a reasonable substitute for that good but unremarkable break-time cup of coffee.
And if that seems tame, consider changing out of business garb entirely and climbing into a kayak or raft—again, right in the middle of downtown. Seeking to attract outdoors buffs, the city spent $1.5 million on a whitewater park that hosts events throughout the year. Beginners can try the gentle 1,200-foot south channel, while more accomplished paddlers can break a sweat in the north channel’s carefully designed Class II and III rapids and obstacles.
Alternating a meeting in a conference room with downtown kayaking and fly-fishing may not be the biggest contrasts you can generate here, though. Reno is perched in a sweet spot between the high but relatively wet western side of the Sierra Nevada and the lower but parched basin-and-range deserts of the rest of Nevada—which offers visitors the opportunity to ski fresh powder in the morning and then hit the links for a polo-shirted golf outing in the afternoon. It’s the kind of day that planners can design to either fire attendees up before a meeting or wind them down afterward.
“We have year-round golf and you can ski in a limited time frame. So that’s unique: ski and golf the same day,” says John Leinen, vice president of convention and tourism sales at the Reno-Sparks Convention and Visitors Authority.
The area’s big ski resorts include Heavenly, Alpine Meadows, Northstar at Tahoe, Homewood and Squaw Valley, while golf courses on the drier side of the mountains include Arrowcreek, Lakeridge, Rosewood Lakes, Sierra Sage, Washoe County and Wildcreek in and around Reno, and the Resort at Red Hawk’s course lies a bit farther to the northeast of Reno and Sparks.
Hope you had a good break. If you didn’t, you can’t blame Reno.