I spent a month in Las Vegas last week…

On January 4th, my east coast holiday adventure ended and I flew back to Los Angeles with little thought as to the subsequent step of my road trip. This turned out to be quite fortunate, because Delta lost my bag. I luckily had a friend in Santa Monica who allowed me to sleep for two nights on his couch, waiting for the misplaced luggage, until I finally drove back to the airport and walked among the many rows of Samsonites and TravelProcs and located my own. The Delta representative checked the tag against my dog-eared ticket stub and smiled apologetically. “There’s only two of us. We can only work so fast.”

At least my ATL-to-LAX flight was graced by the presence of the mom from Home Alone, registering the first celebrity sighting of my trip. Scintillating.

Having retrieved the wayward bag, my maps told me I was 700 miles from Salt Lake City and 1,000 from Denver, the two skiing cities on my short list of possible destinations. The road to both ran through Las Vegas, so I decided to stop and spend a night there. Or four.

Most of Nevada is dusty and dry and brown and uninhabited. The 4.5 hour drive was through desolate country that would make excellent zoning for munitions testing or the exile of immoral hedge fund managers. I’d left my camera’s memory card in South Carolina so you can simply insert into your mind’s eye the landscape of every Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoon every made. The infreqent mountain ranges were eroded and soft, like if you crumpled a sheet of butcher’s paper and poured water over it.

I neared Sin City. Priceline.com got me into Sam’s Town Hotel & Casino (all hotels in Vegas are casinos, and vice-versa), but driving up to it, I didn’t expect the size.

The hotel was built around a giant ten-story atrium resembling a tropical rainforest. The complex housed a 56-lane bowling center, an 18-screen movie theater, and about a jillion slot machines. It also had table games. (Fun fact: people in Sam’s Town Casino are better poker players than I.)

On Thursday I went to the Las Vegas strip and was blown away by the sheer opulence of the properties there. It actually does look the pictures I’d seen, which is no small feat.

I saw the Bellagio, Bally’s, the Trump hotel, the Palazzo, the Venetian, and Caesars Palace (which is planning a $1 billion renovation.) I spent Thursday and Friday night on the strip, playing poker and people-watching. (Fun fact #2: free beers at casinos are the most expensive beers you’ll ever drink.) I attempted to make my money back in cocktail shrimp and prime rib at the Harrah’s buffet, and turned in an admirable performance.

I carved time out of this exercise in excess to see the Hoover Dam. Whatever word you’d get if you divided “impressive” in half, that would be the Hoover Dam. The most entertaining part was overhearing the tourist grade-schoolers say “Where are the DAM bathrooms?” and “Look at this DAM shirt!”, while helpless parents rolled their eyes.

^ Front of the dam. The water levels were rather low.

^Back of the dam, looking down.

Saturday morning I grabbed my keys and my now-lighter wallet and drive north. Short-term accomodations in Salt Lake City were booked for the Sundance Film Festival in late January, so I set my sights on Denver, 750 miles away.

^ Northern Nevada

^ Moon rising over Utah

Saturday night I spent in Green River, Utah, in a $34.99 motel. I wanted a hot shower after my day’s drive, but quickly abandoned that plan after peeking into the bathroom.

^ Utah, Sunday morning

Denver was only 350 miles away but it took me 7.5 hours to drive it on Sunday after getting caught in a snowstorm near Vail.

The road was icy and wet. I only had trouble once, while driving through a tunnel of all places. I was cruising at 55 mph, taking up half of each lane in the light traffic, when I suddenly found myself moving at the same speed, in the same direction, but pointed at a 45^o angle to the white road lines. The concrete walls of the tunnel sat about a foot from the lane’s boundaries, not leaving much room for error. A series of carefully decreasing S-curves allowed me to correct the slide, you’ll be happy to know, without damaging the walls of the tunnel.

I’m now in an extended-stay hotel in Aurora until Friday, at which point I will attempt to find further accommodations in the area. It snowed three inches my first night here.

^ My course so far. I inadvertently did pretty well at hitting most of the western states.