The older kid and I have been planning her 21st birthday trip to Las Vegas since long before she was 21. We like spectacle, and oddities, and immersive experiences of all sorts. We like buffets and novelty doughnuts. Resort swimming pools. Wandering around and looking at stuff.
And it wasn't exactly high culture, but Las Vegas had all of that, more than enough to keep us completely entertained for the four days we spent there.
But technically, the second thing we did upon arriving in Las Vegas was leave it to drive to the Grand Canyon for 24 hours.
The first thing we did was go to Omega Mart!
Except we didn't, because Omega Mart is beyond anything we've done before. The space is set up as a real-ish grocery store, with both fakey products for display and fakey products that you can really buy.
Such as the spray horse!
--and you're in another world!
You wander around and browse Omega Mart, until perhaps you discover a portal to another dimension. You pass through--
--and you're in another world!
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| Apparently, these slides used to be functional, but they had to be partially dismantled because they were super dangerous. |
The kid thought that this genuine pay phone was particularly exotic, and she had to be instructed on the steps to use it:
There is a lot of lore involved, including an inexpensive swipe card that you can purchase to get deeper into the backstory, but we were plenty busy (and overstimulated!) this first time just by sightseeing and looky-looing. You can still get pretty far into the lore without the extra steps, anyway:
I swear, though, that I have never been so overstimulated in my life. I was flat-out longing for some Loops, and if they sold them in the Omega Mart I bet they'd make bank!
Can you have an immersive art installation without an infinity mirror? Experience tells me no.
After a couple of hours, hopefully you can find out how to portal yourself back into Omega Mart, and then you'll find that somehow you still haven't seen all the things there are to see there!
Eventually, we bravely made our way back into the furnace that was Las Vegas in mid-July, discovering that the city is nearly as weird outside as it is inside Omega Mart--
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| So much space alien theming in Las Vegas! I'd sort of wanted to go to a specific spot I'd heard about where you can park and see the JANET flights take off and land at the Las Vegas airport, but we didn't have time. |
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| I am unabashedly looking forward to the Sphere THE MOST!!! It's so giant and stupid! |
...with a pit stop at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area Visitor Center:
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| Back in tropical weather, just a month after our last palm tree sighting! |
I LOVE myself a giant topographic map. You can see right where we are!
And where we are is right here!
I'd wanted to detour over to the Hoover Dam, and I'm not gonna lie, it's because I wanted to buy a "This is My Dam T-Shirt" from the gift shop, but I ALSO wanted to see the sun set over the Grand Canyon. Natural wonders won over the wonder of human engineering, so off we drove:
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| One of my favorite things about traveling is renting a car with a nice, big screen for the GPS and a Bluetooth for my Spotify. We listened to so many podcasts on this drive! |
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| Also: new-to-us road trip snacks! This one was gross, but the kid got a Monster slushie that apparently hit. |
We were staying overnight at a cabin in Bright Angel Lodge, just steps from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, so our first stop wasn't even a glorious natural wonder, but instead the lobby of the lodge. As my partner was checking us in, the kid and I wandered into the gift shop next door, and look at who I found!
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| There is a whole series of these books and I'm obsessed with them all, but Death in Yellowstone is my favorite. |
You'll be pleased to know that everywhere we went on the next day, I recapped who had died there and how. Did you know that the greatest risk factor in dying in the Grand Canyon is being male? And that a surprising number of those men die from picking up a rattlesnake with their bare hands?
Anyway, this whole time I was REVVED UP to get my first sight of the Grand Canyon, and even more so to see the look on the kid's face when SHE got her first sight of the Grand Canyon. I took her there when she was six, but she doesn't remember it (even though her sister, who was four years old at the time, still does!). So imagine the look on MY face when I look up from browsing Grand Canyon hoodies (I both constantly do not need and constantly desperately want a new hoodie from every tourist attraction I visit) to see that 1) this gift shop has a giant wall that's just a window looking out onto the Grand Canyon, and 2) beyond that window is just... orange-brown nothingness:
Because right. The North Rim of the Grand Canyon is currently experiencing a terrible wildfire. I'd been following it on the news, but just because I'm interested in the Grand Canyon, and not because I thought it would affect my visit--the North Rim is a really long way from the South Rim!
But not as far if you're smoke, I guess...
Just... I don't want to be one of those tourists that doesn't give a fuck about the real-world conditions of the place I'm visiting, and the fire is so terrible and destroying a lot of beautiful natural and human-made wonders and the firefighters are risking their lives to try to contain it and everything... but oh, my god, we rented a car and drove for hours and the whole purpose of the Grand Canyon is the view and then we get there and THIS is what we see?!?
Oh, well. A smoky day at the Grand Canyon is better than a clear-sky day sitting at home on my couch!
And the sunset was spectacular:
Tomorrow, we're going to spend the day (hopefully) seeing the sites along the South Rim, then drive back into Las Vegas in the evening.
P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!
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