La La Lands

Near midnight last night, we arrived in Vegas and immediately set about losing money. David had managed to navigate traffic through LA and around the airport to connect with me at the Radisson after my weekend conference. After some re-packing of the car, we hit the road and headed for Sin City.

Here's some proof that I was, in fact, leaving LA. And here's what it looked like as we finally began to break free of traffic and head into the hills.

Soon enough, night descended. It was a beautiful evening with an incredibly full moon accompanying us through the desert.

But we were hardly alone. There was steady traffic heading to Vegas and even steadier, sometimes jammed up traffic heading back to LA. At times the ribbon of oncoming headlights looked like one of those domino structures that people build and then tip so that the dominoes fall along in a pattern for about 5 minutes. Quite mesmerizing.

We decided to make a short stop to take care of all fluid and energy displacement and replacement, figuring we'd eat an actual meal once we got to our destination. Dinner was a quick stop at Carl Jr.'s, which was surprisingly decent for fast food. Gassed up and ready to go, I turned the wheel over to David (the first time this trip that someone else has driven) and settled back to gaze at the stars and catch up with my son.

Here's a pretty awful photo that tries to capture what it's like to do this drive at night. Other than the stream of oncoming lights, it's quite dark until the brilliant lights of casinos erupt from the inky night. This is coming into Baker (thank you iPhone pictures for having the GPS function).

After what actually seemed like a pretty easy 4+ hours of driving, we were assaulted by the lights and general sensory overload of Las Vegas. We managed to find our hotel, shown below. Pretty darn hard to miss.

Here's how the view looked from our room at night.

We headed down to the casino, had drinks (which is where David snapped the lead-off photo for today's entry), managed to lose perhaps $5, and took our extremely tired selves to bed without bothering to get anything to eat. It was 2AM.

This morning, after a very refreshing night's sleep, we were up and at 'em early. We ate breakfast at the hotel buffet, which is a cavernous space that goes on and on and on. It actually puts Big John's breakfast plate in Carlsbad to shame. You can load your plate with eggs, omelettes of every stripe, eggs benedict, eggs florentine, and probably some other egg dishes that I overlooked. There's bacon, sausage, chorizo, ham, what they call Canadian bacon (which I now know is a poor imitation), lox, smoked trout, some other fish, beef tip, and probably some ersatz meat as well. Then there are berries, melons, peaches, apples, yogurt (4 kinds), and granola, not to mention cream of wheat and oatmeal. Elsewhere there are croissants, muffins, several other pastries, every type of bread imaginable, and bagels. Oh, and did I mention that they also feature all the breakfast items that Asian guests enjoy? It goes on for miles and at $15 each it was actually pretty reasonable. We were certainly quite well replenished by the time we waddled out of there and into the casino for a little morning slots action.

David was the big winner, turning $10 into $23.25 and thereby recouping most of what I had managed to lose. We cashed in our tickets and took ourselves on a little tour of the property. We checked out the conservatory, which features beautiful Chihully glass coupled with fanciful hot air ballons and various animals, all nestled into an amazing flower display.

They have these very neat water features that shoot out an arc of water that manages to work in such a way that part of the arc stays for an extra second. My pictures of it didn't really work. We did, however, take our first pictures of ourselves. These, too, are from the garden area.

We strolled around the pool, found out that the fountain show wouldn't be starting until 3PM (that's after it had ended at midnight last night so we missed out on that altogether), debated logistics, and decided to head out. Here's a shot of the daytime view of the pools from our room, snapped as I was packing up.

And here's one last shot as we bid adieu and headed our of Vegas.

It was onward to Boulder City, a wonderful little town near the Hoover Dam.

Here's the funky spot where we had lunch. And here's what we had.

The grilled chicken with chile was a wonderful sandwich. The burger was great, too, but perhaps something lighter would have been a better choice. Mostly, though, lunch was an opportunity to pore over the map and decide where we were going next. This whole part of the trip has been somewhat murky and ill defined. We finally realized that although the border issues make it seem a bit dicey to do so, we actually both wanted to head further south and maybe see what it's like. Thus we decided we'd head to Tucson, adding about 3-4 hours to our expedition for the day.

Licking our fingers, we walked around the two blocks that constitute the historic district. Here's David being misted -- their sweet if ineffectual attempt to mitigate the 100+ degree temperature so folks can sit outside.

And here's a funny sign we saw on a sad-looking saloon.

From there it was on to crossing the Hoover Dam. We caught our first sight of Lake Mead leaving Boulder City.

Next thing you know, you're winding your way to cross the dam. What a funny spot! It's a combination of very functional, including massive electric power transmission wires and infrastructure, combined with epic memorializing, including visitor center, gift shop (of course), and monumental artwork. We breezed through as much as one can when traffic crawls along. David was able to catch a good shot of the new bridge and highway that's being built that will soon replace the road right over the dam.

Once into Arizona, it was miles and hours of desert. I'm sure once one becomes a connoisseur of this terrain the little differences become glaringly apparent. But for me, it's the hugeness that grabs my attention and has me imploring my car mate to please, please try to capture that in a photo. The other element that absolutely captivates me is the sky. Because you can see so much, at times (like this afternoon) it's an odd assortment of styles, nothing quite cohering the way it does back home. It's as if creation is trying on various scenarios -- should I be puffy little white clouds scattered across the sky or smears of sloppy blue/grey; should I gather into storminess or combine everything in one spot? David took lots of pictures. I think these capture it the best and also pay homage to those wonderful joshua trees.

At one point, we got a little confused about where we were going. Fortunately, historic Wickenburg was literally right there and we pulled off to re-examine the maps. We also examined the town, which consisted of one block of mostly saloons that seemed to be mostly closed at 5:25PM. We did, however, get some fun shots.

As we headed through still more scrub and dancing sky, day gave way to evening. I love these shots. They show what it looked like out the right and then left side of the car as night fell -- sunset and moon rise. You can actually see the moon in the second shot as the clouds reflect the sunset.

After stopping for dinner in Casa Grande (Mexican food that was just fine), we found our digs in Tucson. Courtesy of hotels.com we snagged a last-minute deal at a resort. I'm really not quite sure where we are except we're on a golf course, we have a HUGE place with two beds and a completely separate kitchen and living area. It's the closest thing to a home I've settled into since leaving DC 24 days ago and it feels ridiculously luxurious, especially for $100!