Leaving Las Vegas (a week after arriving in Las Vegas)

Also a couple of days at the Grand Canyon

Our family just spent a week in Las Vegas and Grand Canyon (about a day too long in the former and too short in the latter, but what can you do). For centuries, great minds have been trying and failing to make their vacations interesting, so I’ll try to reduce the longueurs by putting this in the form of a top 10 list. (It’s chronological, not ranked, because I don’t trust numbers.) 

1. The B-52s at the Venetian
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the primary catalyst for our trip was to see a live B-52s show for the first time since 1998. It was the last night of their latest residency on the Strip, and the house was packed with middle-aged freaks thirsty to make the whole shack shimmy one last time. And the evening’s antics were indeed suffused with a valedictory perfume. The band’s last performing original members were laid-back and likely a bit tired - as who wouldn’t be on their 20,000th performance of “Rock Lobster?” The exception was Kate Pierson, ironically the oldest of the group at 75, who had the energy to carry the whole show solo if circumstances demanded it. But the overall softness was sweet, not sad, as they prepare to bequeath their good stuff to the next generation of weirdos. This was only Dash’s second live concert (after “Weird Al” outdoors at the Forest Hills Stadium a few years ago), and he got a bit overwhelmed by the sound and spectacle - toward the end he somehow managed to bury his head in my shoulder and take a nap(!) while the band played “Roam,” which was a strangely moving parental moment. 

2. Neon Museum
Speaking of Dash, at 13 he has a low tolerance for smoking, drinking, and gambling and so was understandably mortified by the excesses of Las Vegas, as I’m sure I would have been at his age. So why did we bring him? For the spectacle, of course. And there was no better example of that than the utterly magical Neon Museum, a 2.5-acre graveyard of old signs from the city’s classic heyday. We arrived almost exactly at sunset, and as the darkness deepened the iconic old signs - Stardust, Tropicana, Sahara - came to life just feet away from our faces, way more intimately and overwhelmingly than they ever did when they were suspended in air above the casinos. Vegas is neck and neck with New York in its glee for chewing up and spitting out its past in favor of an increasingly shallow and disposable present, making the museum’s careful curation and restoration especially moving. This is a can’t-miss experience for anyone as invested in beautiful old shit as we are. 

Not a photo we actually took, but what do you care?

3. Naptime
Hope is a whiz at finding amazing deals, and she managed to book us for the week at the Wynn, one of the shmancier resorts on the Strip. Our room’s soft beds and carefully balanced climate control provided a perfect oasis for us to retreat to every afternoon when the insanity of the Strip and the consistently brutal 95-degree weather got us down. In my everyday life, it doesn’t matter how tired I get, I can barely nap - my mind won’t relax long enough to drift away. But, much like with Dash at the B-52s show, Vegas did such a thorough job of ravaging my body and melting my brain that I managed to pass out for about an hour every afternoon during our trip. Now I am desperate to reintroduce siesta in my daily working routine, because I think it might be the only way I’ll survive into senescence. 

4. Omega Mart
If you’re not familiar with Meow Wolf, they’re a Santa Fe-based arts collective that creates huge interactive installations with an enchanting balance between obscurity and accessibility that makes them catnip for a certain type of quirky tourist. This was our first Meow Wolf experience, and it was exhausting but enjoyable. The premise is that you walk into a supermarket stocked with amusingly deranged products, which you can explore at your own pace to discover secret passages into a sprawling network of laboratories, back offices, factories, caverns, and extraterrestrial landscapes upon every inch of which dozens of artists have slathered a thick layer of funny, spooky, and impressively fine-grained details. There’s a story behind the madness, which you can go as deep into as you’d like, but the three of us seemed content to let the mystery flavor our experience without making any special effort to solve it. It’s a perfect attraction for Las Vegas - just let the weirdness wash over you and carry you where it will - but don’t forget to stock up on souvenirs on your way out. 

This random hat shop at the Venetian actually had nothing to do with Love, but you know what, it might as well have.

5. Love
I said we were in it for the spectacle, and here it was in spades. Hope and I saw this Cirque de Soleil Beatles extravaganza when we were last in Vegas about 15 years ago. We had wondered about seeing a different show this time, but when we shared the options with Dash he immediately glommed onto this one because, like us, he’s fascinated with the kitsch and culture of the ‘60s. It was fascinating to see the show a second time after so long - I found myself unaccountably moved by things I hadn’t noticed previously, and the things that made the biggest impact before barely registered. As a technical feat, it’s astonishing - with its constantly transforming stage and death-defying acrobatics, I can’t imagine how they’ve made this machine function day after day, week after week, for so many years. Turns out it’s closing for good this summer, so maybe it’s not that sustainable after all. 

6. Small shops in Vegas
After about 24 hours it became resoundingly clear that the Strip was going to inflict permanent psychic damage if we didn’t get off it a few times. So, as we do almost everywhere we visit, we sought out some small local book and record shops to get a bead on the local culturati. We passed a highly enjoyable hour at the Avantpop bookstore, where the proprietor, Schwa(!)¹, regaled us with local lore, nerded out with us about Edward Gorey and Hi-Fructose magazine, and gave us advance access to a $2 hardcover sale - big thumbs-up! The next day Hope and I left Dash alone in the room to do computer stuff in the room while we visited Record City, another highly recommendable shop with a personable owner who geeked out with us about the Bangles and the Go-Gos and the Jam and Holly and the Italians and other shared tastes in the most inclusive and non-snobbish way imaginable. After this we walked over to the Arts District, a smaller, funkier mini-strip of breweries and vintage shops and restaurants that is probably where we’d spend most of our time if we lived in Vegas, which I hope never, ever, ever happens. 

7. Hoover Dam
How could we drive four hours to the Grand Canyon and not visit Hoover Dam on the way? More spectacle! Vast industrial machinery! Art deco trimmings! The bold and somewhat terrifying imposition of civilization onto raw nature! Hope and I had stared over the edge of the dam on our first visit to both Vegas and the Canyon in 2003 (when my dad and stepmom got married), but that was just one moment of a madcap day trip, and this time we’d scheduled half a day for it. Hope again came through with the intel that, if we showed up early enough, we could take a next-level tour that brought you deep into the belly of the beast. Sure! That’s how we ended up crammed in a dank tunnel without about 15 Hutterites² from South Dakota, where the tour guide told us not to accidentally trip the earthquake detector on the floor or we’d have to walk up about a thousand dangerously vertical steps to see daylight again. We finished out our visit to the obscenely delightful, recently restored Old Exhibit Building, with its adorably sweeping vintage model of the Colorado River watershed complete with automated light show and Cronkite-esque voiceover straight out of Asteroid City.

8. Waking up on the rim of the Grand Canyon
Okay, but so, guys, the Grand Canyon. There’s not much shit as beautiful and old as that. I had only seen it for about an hour back in 2003, but holy crap, I count it as one of the most awesome³ experiences of my life. We knew that we wanted to take longer to soak it in this time so Hope, still the genius planner, managed to book us a night in a cabin that was part of Bright Angel Lodge, one of the on-site hotels run by the National Parks Service. Stepping out of our room’s backdoor, we were immediately smacked in the face with overwhelming gulf left behind by millions of years of erosion, a metropolis of jagged stone, one of the honest-to-god, not-remotely-exaggerating Wonders of the Fucking World. The site is located at the widest point of the Canyon, around 18 miles to the North Rim - that’s like standing on top of my apartment building and seeing a gaping hole all the way past Yonkers or Sandy Hook, New Jersey. We watched the sun go down, set an alarm to watch it come up, and looked at the stars in between. It was the anti-Vegas, a soul tonic to treat the insanity of the previous few days.

9. Being chased away by snow
So no, we didn’t go hiking to the bottom or anything - are you insane? We’re not particularly rugged-nature types of people, but that hardly mattered on this visit. The cozy domesticity of the Grand Canyon Village in such close proximity to the nearly metaphysical dimensions of the Canyon itself was a juxtaposition that I could have spent much, much more time contemplating. We adored exploring the various nooks and crannies of Grand Canyon Village, with many buildings designed by pioneering female architect Mary E.J. Colter, and we joined a bus tour to enjoy a handful of different vantage points further to the west, including Colter’s Hermit’s Rest, where it turns out they bake amazing fresh cookies. We were going to finish out our 24 hours in the Canyon by swinging by the main visitor center, but the weather got the best of us. The area was about 40-50 degrees cooler than Vegas, and we could see isolated rainstorms crop up at various points in the Canyon (where, in case it wasn’t clear, you could make out a single isolated rainstorm amidst the vast surroundings). When the rain and wind started pelting down on us in earnest, we decided it was time to head back to Vegas for our flight early the next morning. But as we drove out of the Park, the rain turned into a miniature blizzard that quickly started to accumulate alongside the road. We get it Grand Canyon, you’ve had enough of us! But you can’t stop us from coming back someday.

Back in Brooklyn… PsYcH!! This was actually taken inside the New York New York casino, because authenticity.

10. Getting home
Our trip was an emotional rollercoaster, not to mention physically fatiguing, so for all of its absurd glory, we were very pleased to return home. Another smart vacation tip: We returned on Friday afternoon, giving ourselves an entire weekend to rest and recover. The naps continued! I was more mellow and energized those two days than I can remember being in years. Of course it all went to shit by Tuesday. But still! 

Honorable Mentions: The Pinball Hall of Fame; breakfast at the Pepper Mill; getting depressed at how seedy Circus Circus is; seeing the Sphere when you craned your neck looking out our hotel window; breakfast at the Southwest Diner in Boulder City, where a very chatty woman told us her entire life history and those of all her family members; the fact that pretty much every Uber driver, service person, or random person we encountered on the street was ready and eager to talk to us at length; Delgadio’s Snow Cap on Route 66, where the proprietor and the decor were both full of yuks; the murals at the pub in Bright Angel Lodge; letting Hope take all of the photos I shared above because I couldn’t be arsed (thanks, lady!). 

1. The “(!)” isn’t part of his name, but might as well be.

2. We did not know they were Hutterites during our tour, but their virtually identical plaid shirts and suspenders tipped us off that they were some sort of religious sect. We knew they weren’t Amish because they all had phones, but we did overhear that they were visiting from South Dakota, so it wasn’t hard to look them up and pin them down. The group was mostly teenage boys with a couple of chin-bearded adult chaperones, and they occasionally lapsed into a European-sounding language that turns out to be a Bavarian dialect known as Hutterite German. Fascinating stuff!

3. (in all senses of the term)