It is. I'm getting pretty sick of Baque food. I only go to em for steak anymore, because steak is, well, steak, anywhere.
Elko is home to a big Basque population, because sheepherding is still an industry here, and recent immigrant Basques do much of the sheepherding work in the US; they have for a long time.
It's very true what you say about the quirky reality behind our stereotypical impression of Red America. For instance, Elko has communities of Basque, Native American, Mormon, Latino, contemporary ranch cowboys, etc. Throughout the mountain west most small red state towns do. Of course, that's the old mountain west. The new west, the greater sunbelt, (in elko it's the neighboring town of spring creek) is just exurbia. From Boise Idaho to Colorado Springs, the flyover states are mutating from conservative-leaning idiosyncracy to explosive sprawl in all kinds of unexpected ways. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20070111/4fd6919c/attachment.htm>