The drive to Las Angeles was quick and blessedly uneventful. We spent two evenings (and the father’s day between them) with our good friends the Budners. Jonah and Jacob had fun running around with guns they fashioned from the peaceful pieces of a marble run, and spewing age-appropriate invictives from their little potty mouths. We hiked in the San Gabriel mountains and spent the afternoon at a pool, sharing dinner at “La Casa de Salsa.” The next morning we re-packed the stuff we had thrown in the car and shipped off two boxes of clothes and other things we hadn’t really intended to bring. We also discovered that in the rush to load the cubes we had shipped away our only camera. So, no photos from this stretch of road.
Monday morning I had a conference call for my contract work, then we started on the old route 66 that runs down Foothill Blvd and headed towards Las Vegas. We didn’t really intend to stop there…but the more I read about it in the guidebook, the more I wanted to go. We booked a cheap room at the Tropicana, which had coconut-scented hallways with peeling teal-and-coral carpet. Then we dressed up (we all looked hot) and headed out to see the strip. MGM was right across from Tropicana, so what the hey, we went looking for the notorious tigers and wound up at the Rainforest Café. Fake rain was sprinkling from the ceiling and every ten minutes there was a thunderstorm that would cause the robotic animals around us to roar, flap and shake. Jonah kept asking me whether things were real or not, because I had already told him that almost everything in Las Vegas was fake, and he had just encountered Astroturf for the first time on a sidewalk in Las Angeles that morning.
Woops on the camera. So it goes!
ReplyDeleteAlmost everything in Vegas is fake...and that's the horrible beauty/ugliness of it. All bigger and brighter than any real life should be!