Las Vegas
Home from wicked old Las Vegas, although there is nothing really old about it and the wickedness is met with eyes averted. The strip is a river of strollers bumping slowly along from one fantasy casino to another. I love this city; I love my fellow Americans who, I suspect, love this place for the odd sense of privacy it provides.
There is a paradox in that. Everything is so public: naked breasts on billboards, little men standing in clusters and ominously snapping cards with lovelies’ pictures on them…Massages!…Private Dances…Escorts!…Coeds, Coeds, Coeds!.. Limousines to a Night of Pleasure.
Who will notice us as we shuffle through the night, free from the restraints we might feel about strolling our hometowns dressed for the beach? We can be rowdy with our pals at the bar, we can lose money, we can speak to strangers, we can smoke! And we love shiny baubles.
Las Vegas is the shiniest bauble of them all. Still…
The strip is not the real Vegas, the Vegas I remember from thirty years of visiting. The real Vegas is downtown on Fremont Street, the street you see in old movies. There is a raw energy there that you don’t find on The Strip. Fremont Street has been modernized, closed off, covered with a huge curved roof on which millions of lights play hourly light shows.
Pedestrian traffic swirls from one side of the street to the other, eddies around souvenir stands, tee-shirt stands, artists offering long lasting temporary tattoos and then forms a circle around a musician offering "Safe Sax." No sludgy rivers of humanity here, no siree!
This is humanity in Brownian motion.
Gambling? But of course, and in an honest gambling den…Binions Horseshoe or The Four Queens…not some imitation of Paris or Venice.
Getting There Cheap—Corolla-ing Along
This was the first trip in years (well, the first trip ever) that we didn’t ride the bikes. We rode in "Old Mr. Comfort" the family sedan. Not exciting at all. No romance. No adventure. Just set the cruise control and feel zero envy of the bikers struggling into rain gear at the side of the road.
This car cost maybe a grand less than our two bikes cost together when new. The bikes average about fifty highway miles to the gallon. But since there are two of them that cuts the family mileage down to 25 mpg. Old Mr. Comfort gets close to 40 mpg, actually cheaper than the bikes.
