Sin city USA, where you can get anything anytime. They say new York is the city that never sleeps, but Las Vegas can rival that claim.
Size and perspective is distorted when walking along the strip. You look out your window and see a particular casino and say “that doesn’t look very far away, let’s just walk.” What you find though when you start walking, is that your destination really miles away. The buildings are so large that your brain is deceived by size when understanding such distance.
On a recent trip, I went to Caesar’s Palace buffet: the restaurant appropriately called “Bacchanal.” This was the longest buffet I could imagine. The buffet meandered a wall, would turn a corner and there would be another spread of food. The amount of food available was obscene. I kept thinking that the entire population of homeless people in the state of Nevada could eat here. The buffet happens every day, so how much food is there? And that’s just one restaurant in one hotel. There are multiple restaurants in every casino and hundreds of casinos.
I don’t gamble but I wander through the casinos and was amazed at the amount of general consumption there was: food, drink, visuals, electricity, water. How much electricity is being consumed? There is an unimaginable about of electrical gluttony.
The advertizements and bill boards are overwhelming: how many versions of Cirque du Soleil does there need to be in one place? Is there really a demand for so much? Where else can you find billboards advertizing vasectomies?
Driving home, we passed my favorite offramp: Zzyzx Road. This open desert with a syllable-free name makes more sense than the over-stuffed Las Vegas.