... my 3rd annual trip to Sin City!
Well, I guess, more accurately said, it's what *I'm* talking about this week ... but I guess there might be a scenario where Vegas has also noticed that I'm in town instead of the other way around.
As per usual, it's the best type of vacation ... a subsidized one ... in that I'm here for a work conference later in the week, but enjoying a few extra personal days since the costs of getting me here are being picked up by my company.
Each year, I have a modest personal checklist of activities. Some things are annual events -- like how I take my $20 and find a slot machine that still has an ARM (when I was little, you didn't throw away your cash lazily with a touch screen or a push of a button ... you had to *work* for the ability to waste your money ... and you had to pull a lever [long live one-arm bandits]) ... or how I try to catch just a touch of time with the elusive-to-date former LVC classmate Erin M (will *this* be the year we finally re-connect?). But most are specific to the visit ... like how, the first year, my goals were to walk down the strip drinking a forty, melding with the inebriated masses and to ride the rollercoaster on the roof of the casino (the latter of which was thwarted in that the ride I wanted had closed down, so I had to settle for the coaster in NY, NY). And how last year it was all about the burger quest I'm on ... and in finding the one for Vegas that was on that list while I was in town (I'd share the cost of the taxi ride that made that happen, but if I did, I think Suzie Orman would find me and kill me).
This year, I've already accomplished my main task ... visiting the Hoover Dam and the Grand Canyon. Seeing as how my epiphany at the Canyon got it's own post yesterday, it only seems right that the first part of that journey ... the trip to the Dam ... get memorialized as well. That part of the trip included watching a roadrunner running across the road in front of me (making me marvel that they are, indeed, aptly named), and contemplating that the Hoover Dam is on a fault line (making me wonder whose fault that was), and noticing that there seemed to be more Joshua trees in the stretch of land through which I was driving than I had seen years before in the park named after the desert botanical treat (making me say out loud that what I was seeing was Joshuaer? or maybe even the Joshuaest? place ever), and considering that, with the water on either side of the dam at the lowest point it's ever been, my children's children might see a dry dam in their lifetime or a Hoover that had outlived its purpose (making me remember that you can't get children's children without first having children, which might be a wrinkle in my consideration), and offering up thanks that there was road construction going on so that there were portapotties every so often on this stretch desert (making me realize that not all parts of every story need to be shared).
We'll see what else gets checked off the list ... or maybe gets moved to year four (should there be a fourth occurrence of this annual trip). Viva Las Vegas indeed!
THE COLLAPSE OF THE HOOVER DAM: THE CONSPIRACY THEORISTIC VIEW:
http://fourthdimensionalrecovery.wordpress.com/2012/04/23/hoover-dam-expected-to-be-the-next-911/
THE COLLAPSE OF THE HOOVER DAM: THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/engineering/structural/hoover-dam-broke.htm
SPEAKING OF THE YUCCA BREVIFOLIA:
http://www.fs.fed.us/database/feis/plants/tree/yucbre/all.html
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