wender bender: all-you-can-jet -- day 11 (part 1) -- las vegas, NV

las vegas

now this is a city i know. i could sit around and figure it out, but i've probably been here for more than two years of my life. blackjack, poker, strange carny atmosphere, neon and (in more recent years) spectacular food. if you ignore the complete disregard of humanity and the fact that everyone here is essentially trying to make a living off the wages of normal, honest working people in the rest of the world, what's not to like?

vegas is like the internet in that it's constantly changing, constantly evolving. the thing you remember in the past no longer in the present – the things of the present are always threatened by the future.

hitting LAS there is already a change from the last time i passed through baggage claim – they've added slot machines … they always had 'em on the boarding lounges, but never here. i don't know who owns the machines here, but it's lucrative … the pay tables on these things are horriffic.

this is a city where i, with a few exceptions, i eat and play for free.

after picking up the rental (and denying the rental agent upgrades to the point that i thought he was going to cry), my accomplice and i ate (comped) at my favorite casino on the planet, the el cortez. i could go on an on, but to keep it simple, the el cortez hearkens back to an era that is far gone – when you're there, you're essentially in a museum where you can actually touch and interact with everything.

as hard as it is to believe, there are some versions of some video poker machines that can actually be played with a positive expectation. they are exceedingly rare and somewhat hard to find. the el cortez, because it is the greatest casino on the planet, has a few of these. since i got in while it was still thursday, i went to the slot club, swiped my card for double points and played until midnight, breaking even … but earning points for a free complementary meal in the future, of course.

(the key to eating at the el cortez is not to look at the food -- the taste is always spectacular)

($200 in 50 cent pieces)

now comatose, we checked into my (free) room at the 4 queens and quickly passed into that nether world i love so much.

07:00, which is so bloody early i don't even like typing it, i'm up, and it's pretty clear i'm not going back to sleep. my accomplice is sluggish but once i mention heading to the desert and not necessarily wanting to be there at high noon, we go into full motion.

after being denied by dunkin donuts again for free hashbrowns on the certificates that jetblue is passing out, i have truckstop cheerios (in their own bowl) and a coke. we're headed to the valley of fire.

rather than rattle on, i'll give you pix. in the desert lighting, and human focal perspective, it's remarkably difficult to photograph ... but you'll get the idea. (the following mostly come from a couple of heated hikes -- we ran across very very few people out here.)

petroglyphs

this was the movie set for "the professionals"

hiking a couple of miles will take you to the actual valley of fire itself. the following three pix are designed to be panorma'd together, i don't feel like doing it right now.

my good friend and business associate, the robot, lives in henderson -- the bedroom community attached to vegas. i needed to see him to give back a car key of his from a previous set of adventures and do a full load of laundry.

the robot was in high spirits, having been recently oiled and a fresh set of RAM. we had a nice conversation where he told me things like, "you don't write about doing laundry do you?" and he was practicing his newly learned human interaction techniques by doing things like repeatedly rolling his eyes whenever i uttered the phrase "el cortez."

there's no such thing as free laundry.

the rest of the robot's family filtered in and out and we talked long enough the the original plan of OPH friday had to be scrapped.

i still didn't have concert tickets for the evening -- my craigslist ads were turning up blanks ... i'm extremely reticent to pay retail for a set -- especially in vegas -- so i rang up tix 4 tonight ... sure enough they had some.

we grabbed a pair of $150 tickets for $100. had a great meal at canter's and headed over on swiss-clock-precision timing.