My 2018 Adventure: Vegas Baby!

Vegas Baby!

Jobs fill your pockets, adventures fill your soul. ~ Jaime Lyn

So it’s finally here, I’m once again unemployed and onto my next adventure.  My last day of work started unfortunately early at 7:45AM with a potluck, but did at least involve a fabulous cake.

My next destination was a quick trip to Vegas to see some family and visit with friends who live in the area.  I had a great trip, and it got me reminiscing about my earliest trips to Vegas and how much the place has changed over the years.  I go to Vegas for set of really specific things.  First to see some friends, I have a number of friends in Las Vegas, some from my childhood, some I’ve made along the way and it’s great to catch up and hang out with them.  It was certainly hot and my stop in Baker shows you exactly how hot.

The second reason is food, particularly given where I’ve been living over the last couple of years there isn’t exactly a great selection of food here, and most importantly an utter lack of good pizza. So I go to Vegas to eat across the spectrum, from really nice restaurant meals to hot dogs, pizzas, milk shakes and cupcakes.  All of my normal food rules go out the windows for a few days.

A nice slice of NY style pizza

I also like to gamble.  I play craps and video poker and honestly this trip for the most part that didn’t go real well.  I didn’t win on the video poker machines and although I had two really fun sessions on the craps table at the Casino Royale, I only won about $100 in one of the sessions, $10 in the other, but had several losing sessions as well.

A lot of people ask me why do you go to Las Vegas?  Well as I mentioned above, friends, good food, fun, gambling and I do a lot of walking and people watching while I’m there.  I usually also have a specific little thing that I’m doing while I’m there.  It may be a specific show or an event with friends.  Although it wasn’t the focus, this trip I spent a really great and mellow day hanging out at a friend’s house for the Fourth of July.  But my little project for this run was to create a specific photo to say thank you and do some urban walking and break in my new hiking shoes in preparation for the street/road miles on the Camino Primitivo I’ll be walking in September in Spain.

The thank you was for my brother and his family, they had sent me a present, a t-shirt with an image of Hunter S. Thompson.  If you don’t know him, he was a writer for Rolling Stone magazine, an eccentric drug fueled madman and wrote the funniest book I’ve ever read, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  In that book, Hunter takes a particularly funny drug induced venture through the Circus Circus casino in Las Vegas, so the photos below were taken as my way to say thank you and celebrate Hunter’s memory.

The marquee for Circus Circus is sort of whimsical and terrifying, and what is holding up that lollipop?

Hunter’s book also included events around the fabulous Mint 400 road race, on the way home I stopped in Jean, NV to get breakfast and coincidentally found this poster.

Found this beauty on display there as well.

This particular trip included a really wonderful day.  It started out with breakfast with my cousins and their two little boys, including a post-breakfast walk through M&M world with a 3 year-old, he lost his bloody mind in there.  From there I took care of some work on my car and while waiting had a really nice burrito bowl for lunch.  After getting back into town, I took a lovely little nap in my hotel room and afterword did a little walk.  After walking for a couple of hours I ended up at a place I’d found online that had inexpensive meals and actually settled in for an early dinner of surf and turf of a really nice steak and small lobster tail.  I strolled back along the strip and did a bit of gambling, I was pretty much breaking even all day, including a nice 90 minute session on the craps tables at the Casino Royale, I ended up winning a whopping $10 but had a really good time playing.  I had a nice slice of pizza and a coke before taking a walk and finally, I floated over to the avenue between the Linq and the Flamingo and hit a cupcake place where I got a really delicious yellow cupcake with chocolate frosting and sprinkles before finishing the day with a another nice walk.

Faux desert villa in Vegas mall

Nice thing about walking in Las Vegas, you can walk all the way to Egypt.

It wasn’t a spectacular day, nothing super exciting happened but it was absolutely a day I needed.  I accomplished the one little errand I needed to get done, hung out with my cool little cousins, I ate really good food, had a cupcake, had fun gambling and got a good nights sleep.  A nice mellow and really happy day to kick off my next adventure, hope you’re having happy days as well my friends.  ~ Rev Kane