positivelyBLEAK Grinning back into the abyss.

I Came, I Saw, I Partied

…aaaaand we’re back. Sorry for the hold-​up, everyone, it was a hell of a party in Vegas and another hell of a recovery from the time dif­fer­ence. (When else do I get to squeeze in 17-​hour sleeps?)

It’s a hell of a town! I can’t say I was reppin’ the fash­ion­ista look, due to packing one carry-​on sized bag full of what­ever is appro­priate fro desert travel, but I spied enough designer brides­maid dresses and killer sky-​high around the casinos to last me a while. There’s nothing quite like hanging out by the black­jack tables, smoking a butt in my pajamas at 3AM, counting the number of brides wan­dering around — and, speaking as someone born and raised in the great Puritanical state of Massachusetts, it’s even stranger to see people walking around the Strip with a two-​yard mar­garita straight-​up in the open. (Quelling the urge to stuff every­thing in a paper bag was tough.)

The trip, in pictures:

The view from the Venetian, at night.

…walk out the front entrance, walk a few hun­dred feet, and you can see pirates in the middle of a sexy battle.

Walk another few hun­dred feet and try not to mob the abs-​bus.

I didn’t spend too much time in the casinos; I’m not a big gam­bler, but I love to watch the high-​roller tables and blow on a few dice. I played these…

…and my mom played THESE. (How adorable is my mom?) We might not have raked in the win­nings, but we broke even and I was up about $0.30 by the time I walked. My for­tunes are appar­ently made in small change.

This guy was parked right out­side our suite, and in the maze of hotel hall­ways, he became a valu­able land­mark. “We’re right past the guy with the weave and the weird nose.”

Dos Caminos, a really excel­lent Mexican restau­rant in the hotel, and the cen­ter­piece of the décor: a wall of friggin’ skulls. Who else wants this in their living room?

We ended up taking a thirteen-​hour tour of the Mojave desert, vis­iting a few dif­ferent points of the Grand Canyon by off-​road Jeep and heli­copter, floating down the Colorado and pointing out Conquistador graf­fiti on the rock for­ma­tions, spot­ting wild horses and bighorn sheep, vis­iting a working ranch com­plete with cute cow­boys, and checking out the Hoover Dam. (It’s a damn big dam, hurr hurr!) Here’s our heli­copter, leaving us in the canyon after our first trip down.

Want to know how to make people ner­vous? Crawl down into a crack in the sheer rock face at Quartermaster Point and snap photos.

We par­tied together pretty hard, saw just about every­thing there was to see (trag­i­cally, Star Trek: The Experience has yet to re-​open, but the storm troopers patrolling the Strip helped a lot), ate and drank our­selves merry, and, in my case at least, spent the red-​eye catching up on Junji Ito comics — Voices In The Dark is an excel­lent way of making sure that nobody tries to read over your shoulder.

Would I go back? Planning on it.