July 2, 2006: Altadena, Pasadena, & Las Vegas
Signs of the Southwest:
• Sunshine
• Spanish
• Celebrity sightings
• Palm trees and cacti
• California beaches
• Nevada casinos
Sin City, here we come! Las Vegas arouses such contradictory emotions: love and hate, fear and loathing. The fantasy of sudden wealth appeals to everyone, yet the grit of real-world disappointment and desperation is palpable in every smoke-filled casino and every run-down storefront. The contrast is quintessentially American.
Before leaving Southern California, I visited a former Seattle colleague, Steve, his wife Susan, and their cute 3-year-old son Alberto. Steve, who grew up in Argentina, is a grad student at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, writing his doctoral dissertation on the Dead Sea Scrolls. I unfortunately didn't have time to get in touch with another friend by the name of John, a musician and independent record producer whom I met as a student at UCLA. He founded The Urinals, a punk rock band of some repute, and he recently sent me a CD containing a couple of live tracks I had entirely forgotten recording for them in 1978. (A seminarian and a punk rocker? Now that's eclectic!)
Listening to Moroccan music to set a desert mood, we drove over the San Bernardino Mountains into the high desert and across the Mojave Furnace. The searing heat assaulted me when I stopped to photograph some of the the weirdly-shaped Joshua trees growing there. Debbie informed me that they are a species of yucca plant, and Wikipedia informs me that they are in fact the largest species, and that they were named by Mormons after the bloodthirsty Biblical leader because they resembled his upraised arms.
The heat also assaulted the engines of the many cars sitting along the road with their hoods open. I was very glad not to be among them. The occasional billboards for Vegas casinos and shows let us know we were only 100 miles away from our destination.
A sign that particularly attracted our attention was one-of-a-kind Zzyzx Road, which you can read all about here. We passed it just before we reached the appropriately-named town of Baker, smack dab in the middle of the desert. Debbie tried to capture the sign as we drove by but failed to account for the delay in the shutter on a digital camera, so I copied this photo from a website.
It occurs to me that one could concoct an elaborate hoax without traveling a single mile simply by downloading photographs of landmarks and Photoshopping oneself into them. I assure you, however, that I'm not doing this.
We drove through a brief rainstorm just as we crossed the state line into Nevada and the amusingly-named town of Primm, a gaudy oasis of casinos and outlet stores, complete with a rollercoaster. "It may be Primm," Debbie quipped, "but it sure ain't proper." We tried a call to another UCLA friend in Las Vegas, a singer named Carol, but neither she nor her family were home. (Two days later, she emailed to tell us that she had been in L.A., but that her husband Steve was playing keyboards for a singer on Fremont Street. We walked right past him without realizing it!)
Pulling into Vegas, we noted the many hotel and apartment towers under construction, a good number of them with gold-tinted windows. Danny pretended to be disappointed that the golden Mandalay Bay was not covered with real gold. We rode the tram from there to the Luxor and the Excalibur, which used to have a big animatronic dragon show for the kids. But Vegas is trying to sex up the city again, so the boys had to make do with a plaster statue.
Tommy informed us that the Sphinx in front of the Luxor pyramid had the head of Osiris, since he wore a false beard and a coiling cobra headpiece. Walking through the entrance, he identified Anubis and Amun Ra, whom he had studied in an Egyptology unit in his third-grade class. An enormous US flag hung from the ceiling at the center of the Luxor. Tommy joked, "I didn't know the Egyptians were American."
We skipped the new Las Vegas monorail and the landmark Stratosphere. Even though they are somewhat longer and taller than the structures in Seattle, we still have the originals! We did go to "old Las Vegas" (if anything in this city can be called "old") for dinner and for the Fremont Street Experience, a short, silly overhead light show involving aliens that totally involved our boys. They talked about UFOs and such for the rest of the night.
Las Vegas at night is, if anything, even hotter than it is during the day, since the air doesn't dissipate its heat quickly, but the concrete does. We watched fireworks over the Stratosphere, bought gas ($2.83 a gallon), and headed to Circus Circus, where for the first time we saw an appreciable number of children.
The last time we were there, when Tommy was three and Danny was a babe in arms, Tommy won a stuffed gorilla on his first pitch of a ping-pong ball into a sideshow game. We tried the same game again this time, and what do you know - he won again! As Tommy hugged his prize, a stuffed monkey, a man gave his brother another one, saying, "Now your monkey can have some company." The boys both celebrated and promptly named their plush pets "Ooki" and "Fookey."
Over 40 million Americans are traveling this weekend, 85% of them by car. I had assumed that the top Independence Day tourist destination would be Washington, D.C., or some such place, but I read on the Internet, and we discovered to our dismay, that it is Las Vegas. We were forced to drive all the way to Utah, to find a room for the night. At about 2 a.m. Mountain Time, we arrived at our first hotel of this trip, the Fairfield Inn in St. George. We set our clocks an hour ahead of Pacific Time, which Nevada observes.
• Sunshine
• Spanish
• Celebrity sightings
• Palm trees and cacti
• California beaches
• Nevada casinos
Sin City, here we come! Las Vegas arouses such contradictory emotions: love and hate, fear and loathing. The fantasy of sudden wealth appeals to everyone, yet the grit of real-world disappointment and desperation is palpable in every smoke-filled casino and every run-down storefront. The contrast is quintessentially American.
Before leaving Southern California, I visited a former Seattle colleague, Steve, his wife Susan, and their cute 3-year-old son Alberto. Steve, who grew up in Argentina, is a grad student at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, writing his doctoral dissertation on the Dead Sea Scrolls. I unfortunately didn't have time to get in touch with another friend by the name of John, a musician and independent record producer whom I met as a student at UCLA. He founded The Urinals, a punk rock band of some repute, and he recently sent me a CD containing a couple of live tracks I had entirely forgotten recording for them in 1978. (A seminarian and a punk rocker? Now that's eclectic!)
Listening to Moroccan music to set a desert mood, we drove over the San Bernardino Mountains into the high desert and across the Mojave Furnace. The searing heat assaulted me when I stopped to photograph some of the the weirdly-shaped Joshua trees growing there. Debbie informed me that they are a species of yucca plant, and Wikipedia informs me that they are in fact the largest species, and that they were named by Mormons after the bloodthirsty Biblical leader because they resembled his upraised arms.The heat also assaulted the engines of the many cars sitting along the road with their hoods open. I was very glad not to be among them. The occasional billboards for Vegas casinos and shows let us know we were only 100 miles away from our destination.
A sign that particularly attracted our attention was one-of-a-kind Zzyzx Road, which you can read all about here. We passed it just before we reached the appropriately-named town of Baker, smack dab in the middle of the desert. Debbie tried to capture the sign as we drove by but failed to account for the delay in the shutter on a digital camera, so I copied this photo from a website.It occurs to me that one could concoct an elaborate hoax without traveling a single mile simply by downloading photographs of landmarks and Photoshopping oneself into them. I assure you, however, that I'm not doing this.
We drove through a brief rainstorm just as we crossed the state line into Nevada and the amusingly-named town of Primm, a gaudy oasis of casinos and outlet stores, complete with a rollercoaster. "It may be Primm," Debbie quipped, "but it sure ain't proper." We tried a call to another UCLA friend in Las Vegas, a singer named Carol, but neither she nor her family were home. (Two days later, she emailed to tell us that she had been in L.A., but that her husband Steve was playing keyboards for a singer on Fremont Street. We walked right past him without realizing it!)
Pulling into Vegas, we noted the many hotel and apartment towers under construction, a good number of them with gold-tinted windows. Danny pretended to be disappointed that the golden Mandalay Bay was not covered with real gold. We rode the tram from there to the Luxor and the Excalibur, which used to have a big animatronic dragon show for the kids. But Vegas is trying to sex up the city again, so the boys had to make do with a plaster statue.
Tommy informed us that the Sphinx in front of the Luxor pyramid had the head of Osiris, since he wore a false beard and a coiling cobra headpiece. Walking through the entrance, he identified Anubis and Amun Ra, whom he had studied in an Egyptology unit in his third-grade class. An enormous US flag hung from the ceiling at the center of the Luxor. Tommy joked, "I didn't know the Egyptians were American."
We skipped the new Las Vegas monorail and the landmark Stratosphere. Even though they are somewhat longer and taller than the structures in Seattle, we still have the originals! We did go to "old Las Vegas" (if anything in this city can be called "old") for dinner and for the Fremont Street Experience, a short, silly overhead light show involving aliens that totally involved our boys. They talked about UFOs and such for the rest of the night.Las Vegas at night is, if anything, even hotter than it is during the day, since the air doesn't dissipate its heat quickly, but the concrete does. We watched fireworks over the Stratosphere, bought gas ($2.83 a gallon), and headed to Circus Circus, where for the first time we saw an appreciable number of children.
The last time we were there, when Tommy was three and Danny was a babe in arms, Tommy won a stuffed gorilla on his first pitch of a ping-pong ball into a sideshow game. We tried the same game again this time, and what do you know - he won again! As Tommy hugged his prize, a stuffed monkey, a man gave his brother another one, saying, "Now your monkey can have some company." The boys both celebrated and promptly named their plush pets "Ooki" and "Fookey."Over 40 million Americans are traveling this weekend, 85% of them by car. I had assumed that the top Independence Day tourist destination would be Washington, D.C., or some such place, but I read on the Internet, and we discovered to our dismay, that it is Las Vegas. We were forced to drive all the way to Utah, to find a room for the night. At about 2 a.m. Mountain Time, we arrived at our first hotel of this trip, the Fairfield Inn in St. George. We set our clocks an hour ahead of Pacific Time, which Nevada observes.
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