Taking a Gamble on Vegas

Crossing off two bucket list items

This is my 150th post on this publication! Thanks for coming along on the journey.

Last week I was in Las Vegas for the very first time. Vegas was never high on the list of places I wanted to visit, but two places near it were, so when I was given a chance to go to Las Vegas, I didn’t pass it up.

While I thoroughly enjoyed the trip, I doubt I’ll go back because everything there is simply too expensive and because there are far too many other places on my travel bucket list and I’m not getting any younger. The two big bucket list items that I managed to check off while staying in Las Vegas were a trip to see Hoover Dam and another to see part of the Grand Canyon.

I’m impressed by large feats of engineering prowess, and Hoover Dam is definitely one of those. Plus, one of my favorite romcom movies is “Fools Rush In,” and the dam, as well as Las Vegas, play key roles in it as well as in a few other movies. Booking a trip to see the dam was priority number one after we checked into the hotel, and the concierge set up a great little trip for the very next morning.

By looking at a map, I knew it wasn’t all that far from Las Vegas, but I was still surprised at how short of a drive it really was to reach the dam — our trip included a stop for a hearty breakfast at the Bullet Train restaurant outside of Henderson, too.

It was above 100 degrees all five days we were in Las Vegas, so it was quite hot on top of the dam, but when everyone says “it’s a dry heat,” that’s true, and I’ll take that dry heat to the heat and 90 percent humidity of northeast Nebraska any day. We stood at the Arizona-Nevada line, and I was disappointed not to see the states’ names painted onto the road as they are in the Matthew Perry/Salma Hayek movie, but I suspect that was something they did for effect only. Seeing the high-water mark from years ago in the rock was pretty cool, but I’m sure people living in the area would like to see Lake Mead fill up again.

A couple days later, Kim and I went on a helicopter ride to the Grand Canyon. I’d never ridden in a helicopter before and had no real intentions of ever doing so, but the helicopter provided a 45 minute ride to the canyon as opposed to a long, hot drive there, and we actually flew down in the canyon for a bit. Also, I got to see Hoover Dam once more from the air! I think this is my favorite photo from the trip.

I’ve had the Grand Canyon on my travel list for such a long time, and I’m kind of embarrassed to admit that I’d never managed to get there before. I would like to return, though, and see it from the north rim and for a longer stretch of time than we had this time, but I can now cross it off my bucket list.

After visiting Las Vegas I can understand why so many people love it. If it weren’t for the cost of things, I’d want to go back over and over. Because I knew I needed to make the most of this visit, though, there was a lot of walking up and down the Strip as well as just in the hotel resort to see the tons of stores and restaurants and casinos and pools, etc. that were there. I surpassed 20,000 steps on more than one day, and my feet still hurt a full week after returning home, but that’s partly due to a trip to the Omaha Zoo last Sunday to celebrate my daughter’s birthday that included another 18,000 steps — another incredibly hot day, this time with horrendous humidity on top of it!

Originally, I planned to take my laptop along to do some writing, but then I thought better of it, knowing that I needed to spend the time enjoying myself and that I’d probably be too tired to work anyway. I did write in my travel journal and plan to write a more detailed account of the trip on my travel blog, but managing to do that little bit of writing each night was almost too much for my tired brain to handle. I slept soundly each night of our visit, and I’ve been sleeping hard all week as I recover at home.

Today, finally, I feel somewhat normal again, so it’s time to get back into my writing routine and work on my novel and other things — I did manage to make some progress on the novel yesterday. Another thing I managed to finish after my return home was a feature story I’d been working on for the Norfolk Daily News. That story is running on the front page of today’s paper. I will share the clipping of it below the paywall for my paying subscribers this week instead of more of my novel in progress — we’ll get back to that next week.

Please consider becoming a paying subscriber. You gain access to all the archived posts as well as what’s beyond the paywall on them, and it’s very early in this new novel’s progress, so you can read along with it as I write it and see how it develops.

Until next time. If you’ve never been to Las Vegas and get a chance to go, do it, but be sure to take a lot of money. That place is expensive.

Tammy Marshall