Vegas: What Happens in Vegas Can Stay There

 

I can't put it any other way: Vegas is fairly ugly and contains frumpy people. I will grant you that many of the frumpy people seem to be travelling there for vacation. (For the record this was not a Travelmarx vacation. This trip was about visiting family on the outskirts. We had a good time.) 

People in Vegas are misshapen, dressed in all sorts of wacky outfits, and are wrinkled in the hard-knocks-kind-of-way, not in the sagely-nice-kind-of-way. Furthermore, people who travel there seem to throw any decorum to the wind and behave like idiots. Have you ever been on a plane bound for Vegas where the rowdiness started before even leaving your starting point? I rest my case.

As if frumpy, misshapen people are not enough, they arrange themselves in front of video machines, pulling a lever with one hand with a big drink of some kind in the other and all the while wearing a vacant and vaguely dissatisfied look on their faces, all while losing money. Oh humanity and the misunderstanding of probability theory. 

Traveling around Vegas proper is all endless concrete highway and pavement, crushed stone, cookie cutter residential condo units with names like they want you to believe you are somewhere else (Italy?): the Tuscany, Tremezzo or Bella Fiore (should be bel fiore technically ?). There are the more honest and descriptive complexes with names like Ridge View or Whitney Ranch but they are still cookie-cutters. 

Driving around Las Vegas leave you with a feeling of isolation. Outside of the strip and downtown, we hardly see people using sidewalks or engaged with the community. It’s all built to be best experienced from the privacy and comfort of your car at 50 mph. You learn quickly which parking lots connect to each other so you can avoid an eight lane road here or a divided highway there that you can’t easily get across. There is endless retail: lots of dentistry, video poker and bad food.