From Death Valley you take Nevada’s highway 160 south. It’s a quick drive through flat and open desert prairie covered in small Joshua Trees. Within 50 miles of crossing the state border you reach another set of mountains, a final set of mountain. And then you are there. I rounded a corner in the highway and started my downward descent within a small valley and just like that, Vegas appeared. I had Elvis singing to me, and my heart was racing. The Stratosphere was stretching out above the skyline, and the rest of the strip’s giants were lining up ready to welcome my arrival.
I brought the truck into the Tropicana parking lot in a blaze of glory, or a smoking mess, either or, and for the time being tried not to be overcome by the anxiety that my travel companion may be down and out. The check in was painless, my room was perfect, and when I finally gathered up some fresh clothes and a civilian’s costume, I hit the shower and washed the desert out of my being. Las Vegas was truly my Oasis.
Day ten ended late. I was tired and ready to pack it in around 10:30pm, but realized that chasing the pillow before midnight in Sin City was, well, a sin (and not the kind accepted as currency in Vegas… yikes, too edgy?). So I pushed on, and realized that it wasn’t hard to get lost in the Vegas, both figuratively speaking and literally. While I forgot all about my bedridden Dakota, and easily disregarded my fatigue, I also got lost in over half a dozen large hotel casinos. And that was exactly the path I wanted to follow. I just let it all wash over me. The lights, the sounds, the people; it was all so… ‘Vegas’. It was two o’clock when I made it back to my room, and the strange thing was I still felt like I was bailing out early. Crazy place is running on a gazillion energizer batteries.
Queue Day Eleven, and the start of my Las Vegas run. Well, not quite, I just had to take care of the sick one first, then it was on with the experience. YellowPages, the Front Desk, a few calls to the Command Centre, and finally I had tracked down a Dodge Dealership. Now all I had to do on my end was get the truck to the Dealership and let them mend the Dakota’s broken soul (I’ve pushed her too hard. However I do believe that since her fuel cost more then mine she should be able to put up with a little adversity, I mean really, she’s a Freakin Truck, Come On– sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean it, I know the two day desert dash was a lot to ask, I should be grateful to have such a true traveling competitor…). Well mission failed. I reached Caesar’s Palace and pop, or maybe it was snap, hell it could have been that other Rise Crispy character Crackle for all I know, the damn clutch gave out completely and I broke down on the Strip. This was pretty near horrible on a scale of bad to treacherous (treacherous of course being the same broken down mess of a truck stalling out, but in the middle of Death Valley, with the vultures laughing at me as my tears evaporate before they hit the ground). I tried not to make eye contact with anyone as they pulled around me. I could hear the horns and could see them all waving with there special finger. I also enjoyed it when two cops on bicycles pulled up and avoided pleasantries such as ‘are you okay?’ or ‘do you need some help?’ and moved right into the jokes: ‘From out of town and you’re broken down on the Strip, well good luck with that (large laugher)’. I was half expecting Josh Duhmel to rush out as Danny McCoy and ask me if I was auditioning for Ocean’s 14 with my own flavour of Vegas heist. Three hours and fifty seven minutes after I started to hold up traffic, or in real time, fifteen minutes after I made the call to the towing company, a huge rig came and hoisted my Dakota up off the strip and whisked it away to Emerg.The good news, we got the truck to the Dodge dealership, the bad news it was going to take some time before they could get her in for the hour long inspection. The good news, they had a waiting room, some more good news, I had my Archos Media player full of ‘Flights of the Concords’ episodes, my Chuck Palahniuk novel, and some snacks in the truck, the bad news, the waiting room had some loud woman holding court telling a room full of impatient waiting-room waiters her life story. The good news, after two and a half hours they had inspected the truck, the bad news, the part that needed to be replaced was on back order, everywhere in North America. The good news, they could use another company (other then Chrysler) and get the part into the truck by tomorrow evening, the bad news, I was going to need to get really lucky on the tables to pay for this little operation… so I told them just to put her down, pull the old plug on the Dakota, not to let her suffer, just make it quick and easy… actually I talked to the Command Centre and it looks like I’ll be on the road again by Saturday. The good news, I am stuck in Vegas for one more day, the bad news, yeah right, what’s bad about that.
When all was said and done and I had been Shuttled back to the Tropicana by a two year veteran of Sin City, Frank, who told me much more then I ever needed to know about the dirty world of Las Vegas, it was already closing in on four o’clock. By five I was on the move, and my destination was the MGM’s Grande Buffet. Wow, this was an event. No buffet will ever compare to the operation they are running over there at the MGM. Mexican All-Inclusives forget about it, Luxury Cruise Liners don’t even think about it, Holiday Brunch at the five star hotels not even close. This was the buffet that sent all other buffets in the direction of Death Valley. It was a serious setup and I was ready to take it seriously. Now, I feel I dominated this scene and so with that in mind here was my approach. Keep the plate sizes small; give yourself room to work and don’t get too excited to quickly. You want to be able to eat what you’ve got while it is at its ideal temperature, overloading your plate can leave neglected food time to cool down, or warm up; not good. Take your time; I witnessed many people ‘seeing the food’ and ‘eating the food’ with very few steps between them. It’s excellent food, but it’s important to pace yourself and keep your priorities straight: ‘taste’ before ‘inhale’. Variety; keeping the plate size down is one thing, but you need to also focus on portion sizes. There is way too much out there to fill up on one item, test it out, play the field, and when the time is right, you go back for your hero plate with all the favourites. Feel free to explore the grounds; some people just start dishing up what they see first. You want to wander for a bit, get the lay of the land, and then plan out your courses. If it’s not what you expected just move it to the side; don’t feel you need to finish everything that you plated. The buffet needs to be about experimenting and taking risks, but the beauty is you don’t need to suffer if you chose wrong. Remember the dessert. Some might say to take a break part way through your ‘entrée’ to go for the dessert event, I say just be conscious of the fact that when you are done your ‘dinner’ there is still some more exploring to be done. Sample the desserts; the dessert sizes are usually small, but it’s best to grab everything that looks appealing and then take a bit or two from each before deciding which ones you want to follow through on, or which ones are your front runners that you want to eat first, just in case you fall short on your goal.
These are some of my favourite techniques and today it allowed me to run the buffet gauntlet for an hour and a half. The benefit of eating slowly and making several trips up to the counters is that you know before you have over-eaten. Many people leave the buffet without even room for a ‘wafer-thin’ mint, because they just eat and eat and eat and then suddenly realize they ate five plates too many eight plates ago. As you can see, I take my buffets very seriously, and you know what, in Vegas you have to.It’s night two in Las Vegas, but I am just starting my experience. I’ve won a bit at the BlackJack table, I’ve cashed in on the Lakers game 5 win, and I’ve wandered the strip at night with some of the town’s great characters, but there is so much more for me to see and do. So I leave now to return to the lights, and the sounds, and the people, and I hope to continue to soak up the Vegas.
Day Eleven: Sometimes you need to stall out and break down on the Strip before your Vegas fun begins.
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