(San Luis Obispo, CA)
…Still trying to catch up to the present, so I’m going to try to run through events as quickly as possible…
Since we entered the southwest, we have been constantly in awe of the scenery and natural landscape that surrounds us, but Arizona was the most baffling of all. On our way to Phoenix, we drove through the Painted Desert (twelve miles of crevices and hills turned tons of different colors – red, white, blue, orange, green, purple – by mineral deposits), two national forests (Who knew there were so many trees in the southwest?), and the regular desert landscape of sparse vegetation, tall cacti, and sandy mesas.
We stayed a night in Phoenix with my mom’s cousin Suzy and her daughter Gina, who were fabulous, in the style of the rest of my family. There wasn’t much to do in Phoenix, but we did get out and watch the World Cup final (Viva la roja!!!), then headed next for Sedona.
People say Sedona is some kind of center for energy vortexes and like, Mother Nature power vibes or something, so the town is full of hippies and stores that sell hippie things like crystals and relaxation therapy and meditation aids. The place itself is beautiful – huge red rock cliffs and canyons, tall oak trees, and mild temperatures thanks to the elevation. We camped for a night and hiked the next day in Oak Creek Canyon, on a trail that crossed the canyon’s creek 18 times and ended at a shallow pool where we splashed around a bit and ate lunch. To this day it was the best hike we’ve done, the most fun and the prettiest.
Straight from the trailhead, we split for Vegas, went through the obnoxious process of driving past the Hoover dam, where traffic slows to a stop-and-go pace due to unnecessary security checkpoints and stupid tourists running across the highway with cameras and children. Dumbest landmark ever, in our opinion, but we got through it and made it to our destination, our friend Dave’s apartment, about a 5-10 drive from the main strip on Las Vegas Boulevard.
Vegas is like a weird mix of Times Square, Branson, MO, and a Jersey Shore boardwalk. We were surprised at how much we disliked it. Temperatures were in the hundreds even at night, so we did not go outside in daylight. Our host, Dave, is in Vegas just to work on the Harry Reid Senate campaign, so we spent a good deal of time hanging out with him and his excessively-proud-to-be-politically-active-democrats campaign friends, who kept us entertained and recruited us to help with mass mailings. Among many things, they explained to us why Vegas exists in the first place – founded as a town of guilty pleasures for Hoover dam workers and mob bosses. God bless America. Vote for Harry Reid.
Katie’s birthday was our one and only big night out in Vegas, and it was a blast. We hopped around to a few casinos, blew way too much money on overpriced drinks ($14 wells, what?), but were moved through lines quickly and without cover charge. Meanwhile, at our final destination, a club called Surrender, our guy friends were asked to pay a $30 cover and decided to go home without us.
So Katie and I make our way into this place, which I guess was what it should have been – multiple outdoor bars surrounding a huge swimming pool, with a main dance floor sporting scantily clad and impressively talented pole dancers. Typical club music, Lady Gaga, Ke$ha, etc. We were satisfied with it, but we did not expect it to spark the night’s events. Then Katie ordered a drink, and Russian John entered our lives. He offered to pay for Katie’s drink, and when she thanked him, his eyes widened. No one ever says thank you here, we come to find. Girls just expect free drinks, take them and walk away. “Your friend is a good person,” Russian John tells me, and decides to hang out with us for the rest of the night. Despite an average appearance, the man is loaded. When we get tired of the club, we exit into the casino (connected, along with a hotel called Encore), where he orders us, no joke, two thousand dollars worth of poker chips and demands that we play roulette with them. When we ran out of those, he ordered more. “It’s nothing, nothing at all. I have it, you don’t. I want nothing.” It was true. You would think he was a creeper, but there were no strings attached to his generosity. He finished up the night by popping a bottle of champagne and showing us the view of the strip from a huge picture window in the top of the hotel. Then he bought us a cab home. Never in our lives have we been so rewarded for having good manners.
After the two following days yielded miserable heat, the truck broke down on what was supposed to be our last night in Vegas. We could not have been more frustrated. Luckily, Katie’s dad was sensitive to our growing restlessness. He rented us a car, and we temporarily removed ourselves from the wasteland that is Nevada…
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