Hey folks.  I just left San Diego--which I absolutely loved--and am heading north on 101 towards Corona Del Mar to stay with some friends for a few days.  The traffic was pretty rough, and after a long day walking around the San Diego Zoo, I decided I needed caffeine and to empty my brain of some of the thoughts around the journey.  

Before I start, I want to say that I feel for all of the folks back home in VA and DC who were affected by the recent storms and heat wave.  Based on conversations with some of you and the various postings on Facebook, it sounds like things were/are pretty bad out there.  I'm keeping everyone in my thoughts and prayers, and hope to provide at least some sort of brief distraction with my mindless banter.

Now, before it gets pushed out of my brain by the gorgeous, beachside scenery of sunny San Diego, let me devote a couple of paragraphs to Las Vegas.  

Ostentatious.  Incredibly ostentatious.  After nearly 48 hours running around the Strip, that's the one word that continues to come to mind.  Everything, from the cavernous hotels to exploding volcanoes on the street, strains for your attention and is beyond "over the top."  Yes, yes, I know.  This is what Vegas is all about.  I get it, and I've heard it a ton.  But seeing it is a different thing to be sure.  

A few random thoughts...

The hotels and casinos are truly unbelievable.  In the two nights I was there, I managed to duck in and out of Harrah's (where I was staying), the Bellagio, Caeser's Palace, The Mirage, Wynn, Encore Wynn, Flamingo, The Venetian (probably my favorite), Mandarin Oriental, Cosmopolitan, Monte Carlo, and Excalibur.  Each of them was more grandiose than I could ever have imagined, and many of them were very pretty inside.  In particular, I liked the general feel of Wynn (and the wall of water), the Conservatory in the Bellagio, the gondola tours and beautiful paintings in the Venetian (though you couldn't have paid me to get on one of those boats...), and pretty much everything about the Mirage.  

After having been to several casinos, it will never cease to amaze me the large number of people who sit for hours at the slot machines.  I simply do not understand it.  Some tried to justify it to me by claiming the "free" drinks they were getting offset any losses.  While I can understand that if you play for a few minutes on the penny slot machines, there's no way the math works for someone to sit there, plunking coins into the machines for hours on end, and come out ahead because of a few Bud Lights.  Particularly when they use whatever meager winnings they may have to tip...perhaps it's just the feeling of being there without taking the bigger risk of sitting at the tables...obviously this was a huge portion of the floor at every casino.  

I like to play blackjack.  I wouldn't call myself particularly good, but I generally come out even when I play for a while.  One of the things I like the most about it has nothing to do with the cards themselves; it's the banter back and forth between the dealer and the various players.  There's almost always a interesting conversation to be had with some random cast of characters from who knows where.  I spent a good bit of time at a table with two Brits who were on vacation, an older Japanese woman who "had a weakness for $100 chips" (hey, don't we all?), a middle-aged woman from Iowa who told us about how she had knocked out a guy that "tried to molest her" outside of Tijuana the weekend before (I didn't mess with her, needless to say), and Californian guy in sales who claimed to live in a pad similar to Charlie Sheen's in "Two and a Half Men" (minus the Tiger blood; I asked). Now that produced some interesting discussions...

I did go see a burlesque show, which was quite good.  Not the traditional Vegas "floor show," but more in the style of "Crazy Horse Paris."  It was a good distraction from the tables. 

I know people go there on vacation, but the fact that the Strip was still crazy at 2am on a Tuesday and Wednesday night was pretty fascinating.  It was equally crowded during the middle of the day.  I'm not really sure which it is--that everyone is always out, and therefore doesn't sleep; or if there are two "shifts," a daytime and a nighttime shift, that switch at some point during the evening.  

In all, it was a ton of fun to be on and off the blackjack tables, meet some interesting people, enjoy some good food, and just people watch.  Quite an interesting amalgam of folks  

I'll wrap up with a few thoughts on Hoover Dam, which I took in on the way out of town on Thursday.  

First, the engineering feat itself--constructing a 726 foot tall dam in the middle of the desert--is pretty remarkable.  Completed in 1935, it took four years of up to 5,000 laborers working 363 days a year (optional days off were Christmas and the Fourth of July--go America) to complete.  Some of the turbines and pipes used were actually too large to ship to the site, and therefore had to be constructed on site.  The dam itself is so large that I couldn't actually fit it in the frame for a good picture, but here are two shots--the first is the dam itself; the second is the bridge facing the dam over the Colorado River between the two sides of the river gorge.

Alright, that's enough for now.  I'm back on the road, heading northward.  I think I've got the pictures thing figured out, and will **hopefully** provide the link to that tonight when I "land" in Corona Del Mar.

DRB