Our Trip Out West (1999)

Jeanette found Las Vegas crowded, noisy, and somewhat vulgar (in the old sense of the word), but she was glad she saw it. There are two miniature cities cast as hotel/casinos -- New York, New York and Paris. Each are composed of many city landmarks all squished together in one building. (NY, NY has the Statue of Liberty, the Chrysler Building, Coney Island, etc.) The MGM/Grand is a casino the size of the pentagon. Our hotel, The Mirage, was passable but they make it hard to get anywhere. You even have to squeeze by the slot players to go to the john. Caesar’s Palace is over-the-hill ... still big and glitzy but getting a little seedy. Harrah’s is supposed to be for the big-money players, but it also appeared a little tacky. The Balagio was elegant with its own fine art gallery, but charges $16 @ to see a few third-rate Degas, etc. We both liked the Luxor best. We lost money of course, but not enough to worry much about. We spent one morning at the Hoover Dam. It was awesome. We took the hard-hat tour through the guts of the dam with a good guide. We saw things that I was surprised we could see ... stairways down to nowhere (Jeanette got vertigo) ... huge spinning dynamos ... service tunnels exiting onto the canyon walls and one that you had to crouch in to reach a grate on the face of the dam. ... all well worth the price. We stopped in Boulder City on the way back to Vegas. It’s where the workers on the dam lived during its construction. There is no gambling allowed there which is vestigial from its founding. It still has the feel of the nineteen-thirties.

We left Las Vegas one day early to begin seeing the beauty of the wild west. First, we drove to Zion National Park in Utah. We snaked through one enormous canyon and a smaller red-rock feature ... then up and over a series of large tors (including car tunnels). The unprotected drop-offs at roadside were a little unnerving. Then we continued onto Bryce Canyon National Park (also in Utah) where we had rented a cabin with a fireplace. It just seemed like a large pine forest until we walked about twenty yards from our cabin and discovered a very dramatic deep canyon filled with many multi-colored hoodoos (rock spires) and natural arches ... one of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen. We saw it at sunset and then again at sunrise ... all very dramatic.

While driving the next morning from Bryce Canyon to the Grand Canyon we were humming along a road in the Kaibab National Forest pretty fast. A few hundred yards ahead on the left roadside was a golden eagle eating carrion. When he saw us he took off and I started breaking because his route was taking him across the path of our car. I was surprised how slowly he was gaining altitude so I braked even harder, but he still clipped the top passenger side windshield. Jeanette was looking right at him when he struck and said he was huge and that his eyes were big as saucers. It was a thwacking sound but nothing happened to the car and, I hope, nothing to the eagle. I felt terrible but kept going as I wasn’t about to minister to that big a bird in the high back country. When I later looked at the car, I could find no evidence of any blood or markings where he had hit and, the windshield having a very pronounced aerodynamic slope to it, I assume the eagle caromed off with a bit of a fright and possibly a footache.

The Grand Canyon was just that ... grand! The first morning we took a geological tour with a Native-American park ranger. She was very sweet, but I’m sorry to say, not very bright. She answered every question with a comment the canyon was very wide, very long, and very deep. She always accompanied these comments with spread-arm gestures in the appropriate direction. Jeanette and I quickly left this tour to go out on our own ... the rim walk to and from the El Tovar Hotel (where we also ate dinner that night ... very classic and very good). We saw (and took a picture of) one guy standing, backwards, right at the edge of a precipice. Each year as many as eight people fall off the rim to their deaths but they still keep coming. (Perhaps we should ask our government to close down this canyon to “protect the children” ... or require licenses for those who want to hike there?) We also went down the Bright Angel trail into the canyon for a little bit (trying to overcome our fear of heights) and saw a man coming back who appeared close to death ... barely able to put one foot in front of the other. So we decided that we would go shopping instead. We also watched the sunset from Hopi Point with about a thousand other romantics (mostly Germans and Japanese ... a homage to WW II). I’m sorry to say it may be beyond my verbal skills to describe the sights in the Grand Canyon ... but I truly believe everyone should see this dazzler before they take the big dirt nap.

We then decided to visit Sedona, Arizona before going back to Vegas. It was a beautiful drive down to Sedona from Route 40, but the town itself is a little too earthy-crunchy. It’s full of new-age stuff -- vortexes (or vortices), aura-reading, and crystals. When we were eating a nice lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Sedona, sitting at the next table was a tall geeky scientist (probably from Los Alamos) and a bleached-blond floozy with a Eastern European accent (something like Lotte Lenya in “Goldfinger”). Their conversation drifted onto what he was doing in his lab and he started waxing eloquent on subatomic particle behavior and how certain particles spin backwards in time and how this is matched by others going forward in a mirrored fashion. As he started getting even more esoteric and up-to-date on his research activities, Jeanette told me to notice that his mini-skirted squeeze had pulled out a small tape recorder and was holding it across the table capturing his every word. I couldn’t believe that someone so bright could be so stupid and contemplated taking his picture and sending it to the FBI. But my civility overtook my patriotism and we left them to their perfidy to pay our tab and see more of the red-rock sights. Later, Jeanette did cajole me to clamber up on a vortex near the Sedona airport. It was a rock outcropping about sixty feet high. Far from giving me a promised burst of mystic energy, I had to sit panting at the summit for ten minutes before I could muster the energy to descend back to our car.

We returned to Vegas for one more night (in a cheap motel) before catching our plane back to Boston. On the drive back to Vegas from Sedona we took a couple of side trips along the old Route 66. We didn’t get any kicks there however. We also managed to give the Vegas pinkie-ring set a couple hundred more before we left. Jeanette tried her hand at roulette and we even managed to loose about a sawbuck or so at the nickel poker slots. The flight back to Boston was uneventful except we were again stalked by a gap-toothed, wen-covered guy whom we had met (and were stalked by) on our trip out. We first ran into him in Philadelphia when we changed planes there. He works in a titanium recycling plant outside Philadelphia and he looked like he had a terminal case of metallic poisoning. Whenever we changed our seat, he did too. It was eerie. We expected to see him again in our stopover in Charlotte too, but to our relief he never reappeared. I guess we’ll learn not to be nice to strangers. We cabbed it back to Wellesley about 11:30 at night ... and then to bed.