Las Vegas – Money, money, money, money…

Lest you should think that I spent all 30 days of our RV trip roaming in nature, sleeping in the wild, gazing at mountains, cliffs, geysers and waterfalls, I shall quickly disillusion you: We went to Las Vegas, where we stayed with friends for a couple of days.

Never having been to Vegas, nor to Atlantic City, I was quite excited over the prospect. The Strip! The glamour! The backdrop to so many memorable scenes in movies! Why, Nicolas Cage alone starred in several movies featuring Las Vegas. Remember Con Air, and the plane crash-landing on the Strip? Or Leaving Las Vegas, where Elisabeth Shue watches Nicolas Cage drink himself to death?

Our dear friends, Sheila and Sandy Epstein, don't live on the Strip, of course, but a short drive out, in a spacious house with a beautiful garden complete with hand-painted mural:

 Hubby had been to Vegas in the past; so had my beloved friend Lynne Richardson,  who flew over specially from Dallas, TX to see us.

But for me it was all new: the glitz, the charm, the art, the fake, the sham, the astonishingly well-executed make-believe:

The Ornate ceilings at The Venetian…

extravagant hotel facades -












the artificial "Venetian" canals,

complete with skies that gradually darkens as evening falls…

The posh, pricy shops …

But what really got me was the casinos.
I'd only been to a casino once, for a couple of hours, on some short vacation in Rhodes. It was nothing to write home about (or blog, not that there was such a thing at the time).

Here, on the other hand, was the Real McCoy, apparently. The ones we walked through looked nothing like the well-lit, glamorous establishments where a suave James Bond coolly wins or loses fantastic sums in a game with the villain, while elegant, bejeweled, mysterious women watch on with a sultry expression, sipping Champagne.  I assume such posh places do exist somewhere; that is, other than on a movie set. A VIP room, perhaps? Or somewhere like Monaco?

These casinos were huge, dimly lit, with hundreds of gambling machines and games, and full of totally ordinary people, many in shorts and flip-flops:

And all these ordinary people were sitting there dumbly, persistently, apathetically, hope-filled or inured, just throwing out perfectly good money.

I don't get it.

These casinos are full of people, day and night, 24/7, who come from far and wide, come especially for the thrill, or the hope, or the escape from one's daily grind, or a host of other reasons. Most of them don't even look as if they're enjoying themselves. They just sit there and throw dollar after dollar of their presumably hard-earned money at these machines.

I just don't get it.

Who wants to live in a tent?

Getting back to our trip experiences…

The RV parks we stayed at had sections for vehicles and section for tents. Both sections were highly heterogeneous in appearance and character. Unfortunately, I did not take pictures of any RVs but our own (of which we took around forty… new toy and all that, you understand.) But I assure you there was a huge variety.
From cute egg-shaped units like this:

to huge ones with all sorts of appendages that bulge out once you're safely parked, like this:

Or see more on this page, for instance.

I'm still curious to know where's the button that makes the bulging parts slide back into the main body of the mobile home, and what happens to all the furniture that's in it…

Anyway, as you can see, these constructions are relatively spacious, and more luxurious than many homes. So, I can understand people wanting to spend their vacation in them.

But tents – that's a different story.
Why anyone would want to give up solid walls and indoor plumbing for a flimsy, primitive, fabric "shelter" is beyond me.

The tents in the camping grounds came in all sizes, shapes and colors. Some were ridiculously tiny, others definitely large enough to sleep, say, 2 medium sized adults and two smallish kids… See pics below:

But on windy nights – and some nights were exceptionally windy, not to mention a couple of rainy nights – I was truly worried that the tents would collapse or be blown away. They didn't. I guess tent people know what they're up against and how to secure their collapsible fabric abodes.




















From the window of our RV, I saw the Tent People crawl out of their tents in the freezing morning, walk in their PJs to the public toilets, towel slung over shoulder, toiletry bag in hand, then emerge a few moments later, shiny-faced, moist hair, bluish fingers. Or maybe that last detail was just in my imagination; I myself was so cold, I either dressed under the covers or had the heating on for a short while to take the chill out of the "room".

These cold mornings were in Yellowstone National Park, by the way. Once farther south, say in Zion National Park, mornings were balmy-to-warm, until the sun peeked over the rocks, when it became boiling hot. Which doesn't mean the Tent Dwellers seemed any saner to me.

I got to thinking when was the last time I slept in a tent of my own free will. I add this qualification so as to rule out my time in the IDF basic training. The big, solid, 10-bed tent on the IDF base was fine; the tiny 2-person tent that we put up ourselves during an overnight march was not. I think the only other time I spent in a tent was oh, around 1976 or 1977, when, with a few friends, we spent Yom Kippur on Dor (Habonim) Beach.

Enough nostalgia. Back to Yellowstone, Zion, North Rim. Had I been more outgoing, I probably would have gotten into conversation with some TDs and asked to see their tent from the inside. I'm sure they'd be happy to. We invited some curious people to see the inside of our "establishment".
Oh well – next time!