Indian time

As I have already posted, we spent the weekend at Kenosee Lake visiting friends that we met years ago in Kino Bay. They wanted to go to the local casino for breakfast on Sunday so they phoned around and found out that the casino opened for brunch at 9:00 AM. I'm a big fan of breakfast but I held off Sunday morning and by 9:30 when we arrived at the casino I was getting pretty hungy. "Come back at 10:000 - we don't open until then" wasn't what I wanted to hear but that was the story so we didn't have much choice at that point.

To kill time we went for a drive around White Bear Lake (actually I think the area is called "White Bear Resort" but it isn't very resort like). The lake is on the White Bear Reserve so the cabin owners can't actually own the land their cabin sits on but instead rent it from the reserve. What a dump! Apparently some of the residents of the reserve like to break into the unoccupied cabins so nobody bothers to do much maintenance or improvements on their cabins anymore. And the reserve doesn't always get around to doing road maintenance. And the water doesn't always run and when it does run it often has a boil advisory attached to it. Apparently there still is a market for the cabins at White Bear but I can't imagine why. I wouldn't take one if you paid me to own it.

After bumping our way over what they euphemistically call roads on the reserve we headed back to the casino around 10:30. So we should have been a full half hour later than when they told us to come back. We wandered around the middle of the casino for a few minutes looking at the murals on the ceiling that were painted by some local Indian painter. A well dressed native showed up and proudly announced that the autumn mural had never actually been completely finished. The trees looked a bit goofy - apparently because they were never finished. I can only imagine the conversation "Hey Joe, how much longer are you gonna be? We gotta get the roof finished here!" "Just a couple more days, eh." "Joe, you're DONE. The gawdam roof is going on TODAY."

Anyway we headed back toward the dining room only to be met by a native woman who said "we're not open yet". No "sorry" - no "we'll be open in a couple minutes" - just "we're not open yet". "When will you open?" "Ah, maybe a half hour." We didn't wait around.

The really sad part of the whole experience was the realization that casinos are so bloody profitable that even with that level of mismanagement they can make money.