Omega Mart is the Best Thing in Las Vegas, and the Grand Canyon is on Fire

I'd already suspected the part about Omega Mart, but it's good to have it confirmed!

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!

The kid and I have been to Otherworld, an immersive experience in Columbus, Ohio, so we sort of knew what we were getting ourselves into. 

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!

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!

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--

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.

I am unabashedly looking forward to the Sphere THE MOST!!! It's so giant and stupid!

--and after hitting up the grocery store for water, sunscreen, peanut butter, bread, and tampons--you know, all the essentials!--it's off to the Grand Canyon...

...with a pit stop at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area Visitor Center:

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:

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!

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!

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!

I Did Not Jump into the Tar Pit and Wallow Around in Tar While Screeching with Joy, But It Was a Close Thing

Do you ever get pissed that you can't visit every place in the entire world and see every cool thing that there is to see?

There are so many exciting wonders to experience, and we're missing almost all of them!

Even though I'm all the time, nearly constantly, missing out on nearly every magical thing to see and do, it IS satisfying to see just this one magical thing that I've longed to experience since the first time I learned about it.

Welcome to La Brea Tar Pits!

The website is really confusing because it makes it seem like you have to pay the admission price just to see the tar pits, but when we got there it actually seems like the admission is only for the museum and the tar pits are free? Or at least there was nobody to take our money at the kiosks around the perimeter of the park, only at the museum. That actually makes the museum kind of shockingly expensive for a family of four, but at least the kids could pull out their student IDs to knock a couple of bucks off. 

Tangent, but ever since my kids have grown up enough to be considered "adults" for the purpose of most admission tickets, I've realized that Adult admission to places that encourage you to go as a family, like museums and zoos, is a fucking RACKET. I swear they bump the price to make the Child ticket at half the price feel like a deal, and it's not even so unreasonable when you split the difference, but those four adult tickets stacked on top of each other are a LOT. I think multiples of adult tickets should get some kind of puny discount, because otherwise we're going to have to start drawing straws to see who gets to go into the cool stuff and who has to sit in the car.

Ah, well. What even is money on a vacation, especially not when there are mastodon bones to look at!

And ground sloths!

Antique bison!

American lion!

The tar pit stuff is all crazy interesting. Check out this little bone that a rodent was once upon a time eating on!

And this knife blade that was purposely coated in tar!

This camel that died with stuff stuck in its teeth!

The two most superior animals to ever have fallen in the tar pits are OBVIOUSLY dire wolves and saber-tooths. 

We're at the point in family life where when I tell every family member to go and pose dramatically with the saber-tooth recreation so I can take all their photos, even the most unenthusiastic family member just sighs and obeys.

Guess who the most enthusiastic family member is, though?

Ahem.

This is my favorite exhibit:

Check out 404 dire wolf skulls! I was only sad because the display goes up so high that I couldn't get the best look at half of them:

This is me looking straight up.

Here are the best dire wolf skulls:

The bones are so cool that it kind of makes you forget that starving to death while being stuck in tar is a horrible way to die, and actually suffocating to death in tar is even more horrible. The museum had an interactive display to demonstrate how hard it is to pull yourself out of tar:

Yeah, I could have NEVER.

Outside the museum, there's a park (that may or may not be free?) that encompasses many of the extant tar pit sites:

Didn't pack bug spray, oops:

The lake pit looks the most tar pit-ish to me, but I think it might actually be the least accurate looking:

The "lake" is groundwater and rainwater that's collected in an abandoned asphalt excavation. Tar and methane do bubble up through it, but I *think* the proper tar pits that trapped all the animals were actually pretty shallow.

This is more like what I think the tar pits would have looked like, if you can imagine secret tar also under all the dirt and leaves around the puddle of visible tar:

There aren't any current active excavations of the tar pits, but as you walk around you can see photos from old excavations, and an open pit that looks like the workers just stepped away for a lunch break:

The current and ongoing project involves going through a huge amount of material collected via rescue paleontology during the construction of the LA County Museum of Art next door:

Papped a paleontologist!

I was having so much fun peeping through fences to look at all the named tar pits--

--that it actually took me a long time to notice that there was tar bubbling up EVERYWHERE! Little puddles and sticky bits were all over, sometimes marked--

--but often not. Since it's not a national park site or anything, the big kid helped me collect a little souvenir:

My little tar stick is my favorite souvenir from this trip!

I could have stayed for the rest of the day, just rolling around in little tar pits and poking around looking for bones, but there was not a speck of shade, and I had long ago worn out the patience of our least-enthusiastic participant, ahem, so I reluctantly allowed myself to be dragged out and into the awful LA traffic. 

I had a few ideas for other places to stop at, but omg the traffic was so horrible that the only place we ended up visiting was Milk Bar. It's crazy expensive but I'd heard it was absolutely delicious--

--and it was!

I was especially thrilled with my pint of soft-serve ice cream layered with cakey parts and fudgy bits and crunchies. I also brought my pint jar home as a souvenir, and I fondly look forward to building my own layered ice cream creation and eating it with a wooden spoon.

But that's for later. Tomorrow we go to the aquarium and make up our own food tour!

And here's the rest of our trip!

• Day 1: Cabrillo National Monument
• Day 2: Palomar Observatory and Borrego Springs sculptures
• Day 3: San Diego Zoo
• Day 4: Maritime Museum and Somali food
• Day 5: Sea lions and San Diego Padres
• Day 6: La Brea Tar Pits and Beverly Hills
• Day 7: Aquarium of the Pacific and a DIY food tour

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!