Las Vegas

“Life springs eternal on a gaudy neon street, not that I care at all…

Oh, I’m leaving Las Vegas, and the lights so bright…

and I won’t be back,

no, no, no, I won’t be back.” Sheryl Crow.

I did a farewell drive around Santa Barbara, and by the time I reached Ventura, I was concerned that I wouldn’t have enough charge to reach my destination, so I ignored the directions to HWY 126 and stopped at the Tesla supercharger in Oxnard to charge Freedom rather than trust the extraordinary Tesla navigation system, the first of a number of hard lessons learned on the road from my own mistakes. After charging, I was re-routed through L.A.

Traffic was bumper to bumper, and if we’d crept through L.A., it was stop and go through Rancho Cucamonga, inching along as four lanes merged into one. Once through the bottleneck, I saw one black SUV in the middle of three blocked off lanes, surrounded by six California Highway Patrol cars.

Driving through the Nevada desert, there were miles of nothingness, so my curiosity was piqued when I saw a bicyclist up ahead. He had on a white shirt, khaki shorts, and a white cloth on his head. It was one hundred one degrees outside. I thought about that man until I reached Las Vegas. It was the middle of nowhere, how far would he need to cycle to get somewhere? Should I have stopped and offered him water? Should I go back to see if he was okay?

Miles outside the city, there were homes and apartment complexes being built on both sides of the road. They looked like the tentacles of a huge monster growing larger on the horizon. As I drew closer to the city, residential areas became denser, as did the traffic. When I exited the freeway, the road was torn up. There was construction going on everywhere, and the streets were crammed with cars and people.

I finally arrived at my destination, a large hotel in the midst of the growing city. A drive that was supposed to take six hours had taken nearly nine hours. A valet promised that Freedom would be fully charged in the morning and drove her into the depths of the building. A porter took my luggage and said it would be delivered to the room as soon as I was registered.

The front desk staff was friendly and efficient considering the long lines of people checking in. I was surprised to see how many people traveled with dogs. The confines of a hotel don’t seem dog friendly to me, but perhaps they were used to apartment living. Once registered, I had to go through a maze of corridors to the casino, and show my key to security guards to get to the tower elevators. If you want to make a security guard laugh, ask him if there is a non-smoking casino in the hotel.

The suite I was assigned was almost as large as the house I’d just sold. The bathroom had a large soaking tub, a walk in shower, a double sink, and a large vanity with a light-up mirror to make sure one’s makeup was applied properly. The king size bed was studded with pillows, and the sitting area had built in couches, a desk, a dining table, and a window with a sweeping view of the landscape below. Each area of the suite had a large flat screen TV. Yes, I got an incredible deal on the room.

• 

As fascinating as all of this was, I was exhausted. Rather than venture out for dinner, I decided to shower and splurge on room service. It felt good to wash the stress of the day off, and to loll around in my pajamas, writing in my journal. It took an hour and a half for the salad I ordered to arrive. It came on a linen lined cart. Oscar set the table and pulled out the chair for me to sit. He even shook out the napkin with a flourish, and it floated through the air onto my lap.

I’d ordered an Asian chicken salad. The picture on the menu showed a bed of crisp greens interspersed with colorful vegetables with pieces of chicken scattered across the top. The salad was wilted, probably from sitting on the cart for an hour and a half, and the pieces of chicken were cold McNuggets. I scraped those off and picked through the salad to eat the least soggy of the fare.

Early the next morning I went to find a cup of coffee and something to eat. The coffee shop had a refrigerator and several name brand yogurts. I read the labels to check the ingredients. The yogurt I usually buy has milk and active cultures. I was shocked to see the selection offered made with corn starch, high fructose corn syrup, and a number of other artificial ingredients. I put the yogurt back and wandered with my coffee.

I looked down into a lobby that was filled with the word LOVE.  Being a fool for love, I loved it. I rode down escalators and strolled hallways lined with designer label stores, their windows darkened, but alluring to elicit desire. I felt like Alice in Wonderland lost in a labyrinth of gondolas, streams, and fountains when I was drawn into a deserted courtyard by a blue sky and the pink of the sunrise. I stood there looking at the sky, thinking, “Oh, wow. Oh, wow.” I noticed some objects in the sky and asked a lone security guard what they were.

“Security cameras,” was his terse response.

“How did they get them up there?”

“They’re in the ceiling.”

“Oh, is there a glass dome over the room?”

“No. It’s the ceiling.”

“But, isn’t that the sky?”

Sigh and eye roll. “No, ma’am, the sky is painted on the ceiling.”

I was startled back to reality and asked for directions to the tower elevators. I looked straight ahead as I walked, so as not to be sidetracked by all the distractions designed to lure you into the make believe world of Las Vegas.

Why did I stop here? It’s not me. I read that Las Vegas no longer depends on the casinos for their revenue, billing itself instead as a destination vacation. The hotel across the street from where I stayed has a golf course, perhaps the only outdoor activity I saw. Although the hotels have pools and gyms, they are huge, airless, self-contained monoliths to every sort of excess of consumption.

As I drove away, I remembered the terror I felt as a child watching Disney’s Alice in Wonderland and think of the feeling I had of being Alice as I wandered the labyrinthian halls of the hotel. She was a girl who felt bored when she followed a whim and fell down the rabbit hole. I am an adult Alice who felt stagnant and followed a whim into the rabbit hole of a massive hotel in the middle of a desert. What would the rest of this adventure bring?