Day 10

Yesterday, we went to Las Vegas.

We left L.A. in the early afternoon, and landed at the bottom of the Vegas strip.

Vegas is hell.

Any semblance of the old world of gambling as an activity of those with flair and a taste for the finer things of life is a thing of the past. Vegas is a gigantic mall, crawling with slovenly, mindless sheep and ignorant, tasteless douchebags. The games are all geared at the lowest common denominator. Tables for card games are rare, and they mostly look like cheap plastic folding tables you can get at CostCo. 90% of the floor of every casino/hotel we wandered through was covered by slot machines. SOME OF WHICH WERE A JUST A PENNY TO PLAY. Classy.

There's no party. There's nothing interesting to see. There's just a combination of mall mentality and Disneyworld aesthetic, all of which is just a backdrop for people interacting with nothing but machine buttons and currency.

G-Man and I took a ride off the strip, checking out some of the off-the-beaten-path streets, but everything was either depressingly frightening, or as vapid and plastic as the Las Vegas Boulevard.

It took us three tries to find a hotel on the strip that had any vacant rooms. Despite the obviously at-capacity nature of the city, the whole thing seemed dead.

We'd originally planned to stay two nights in Vegas, but we decided to save our money and our souls and get the fuck out of town a day early. I'll just have to die without ever having seen the Carrot Top stage show. Sorry, you scary, carrot-topped bastard.

We are now on our way to Austin, TX. We've stopped for the night in the only recognizable hotel chain for 30 miles in any direction. It's a town(?) of some sort, called Springerville. It's in Arizona, half way down the state, right next to the New Mexico border. The temperature has dropped to a goddammned minus three degrees Celsius. We do, however, have a bit of a sunburn from the few hours we had the top down when we were leaving Vegas - it was only 17 degrees at that point - not feeling the sun's heat, we forgot to put on sunblock.

On our way here, we took a small detour back through Flagstaff, AZ. On my way to L.A., I'd stopped in Flagstaff, and left my beloved Ben Sherman jacket on the back of a chair in a hung-over daze. The 24 hour breakfast diner still had the jacket for me, so I was a happy man.

On our way out of Flagstaff, G-Man and I found an old-school 50s diner that served me an awesome Fiesta Salad (kinda like nachos, but on salad with a side of cheese quesadilla), and served G-Man the worst food he's ever eaten in the form of steak and potatoes. The real banana milkshakes were the highlight of the visit though.

Tomorrow, we make the long run to Austin by way of El Paso.

Tonight, we're enjoying a few Budweisers (bought at the local gas station - weird) in our classic Best Western style motel room, and planning what to do in Austin when we get there.

G'night!