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Going from Williams to Vegas was like going from a heathly homemade salad to an all you can eat buffet. We saw shimmering trucks emerge from watery mirages in the desert heat, in a landscape devoid of any tenderness.
The Hoover dam was on the way, a quick blistering stop to admire this immense monument to the human ingeniosity. It was conceived as a way to create employment during the Great Depression. Its huge source of hydroelectric power had another side effect, it watered a strange new flower in the desert, Las Vegas, city of sin, city of lights towards which we drove following the electric lines curving low over 93 highway in the heat and listening to The Lord of the Ring on the ipod (with Frodo and Sam venturing into Mordor, it fitted the landscape)
As soon as we got to Vegas,everything started to go terribly wrong. After booking into our room, we decided to try some of the money making machines downstairs. First we had amazing good luck, then we do not know what happened, got a bit exited, got the credit card out...Then to tell you the truth it was all a bit of a blur...Well, that it...we are ruined...we even gambled our plane ticket...
Okay not really, just joking...But you can really see people getting carried away in there and even a few of them on the verge of tears...a good life lesson for Maxim and Callum on the peril of gambling.
We spend three days on the 27th floor of the Excalibur Hotel, overlooking Las vegas Boulevard, better known as the Strip. Maxim and Callum spent a lot of time at the window, fascinated by all the lights and constant mouvement of this place, so over the top, a reminder of the good old days where money was easy. We walked out in the evening heat in a strange admosphere of crowded carnaval where everything goes. People here have huge survival container of frozen alcool attached to their neck, and a beer glued to their hand, from breakfast to dawn. It is okey here to smoke indoors, provided that you sit at a pocker machine. We have seen pale people between hope and despair sitting in a long line of one armed bandits, in airconditionned caverns where all clocks and windows have been banished. We have walked up and down the strip, with Maxim and Callum as two little shields from all sorts of weird promotions. And yet, there is a type of strange poetry here, in the mad re interpretations of parisan or venician dreams, in the Bellacio hotel fountain, a moving watery landscape of classical music...it is like a wrapped Disneyland for adults, as Callum said, a city that is so bright on the outside, so dark on the inside.
It just had to be seen, at least once in our life...
- comments
Nicholle A buffet is an apt description my friend. In every sense of the word for all the senses. A great place to visit but wouldn't want to live there, for sure!