Vegas, Baby18 Jan 2009
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Beautiful Nevada desert driving
Nevada sunset
Nerd stop
| The Economy sucks, so Vegas is cheap: we found rooms from the Riviera to the Luxor for under $30. Off we go! The driving through Nevada immediately became my all-time favorite desert drive. I can't believe the desert beauty and far-off mountains . Not what I expected at all. A little north of Tonopah, we passed some sort of gigantic mining operation - turns out to be the Round Mountain Gold Mine. Here's the official website with a photo of just one (of about 10 that we could see from the road) of the biggest tailings piles I've ever seen. Someone in Tonopah told us that it's Nevada's largest gold mine, and there's an entire company town hidden behind those tailings piles. With gold prices being at record highs recently, I'm not surprised.Still pretty remote: We drove past the Nevada Test Site. We were in the vicinity of Yucca Mountain (yes, this excited me greatly and I had to have my photo taken at the public information center). We saw wild horses from the road. The mining towns of Austin, Kingston, Carvers, etc. are so small and remote that they barely register on Google Maps (but never fear - the brothels are well-marked). After all that, when we rolled into Vegas, it was a little disconcerting after 3 days of almost complete solitude. We looked up our favorite Ethiopian restaurant, and struck out for dinner. The last time we were in Vegas, we stumbled into this place which is completely blacked out from the street, and was equally dark inside. I can't claim to know the official language of Ethiopia, but I can guarantee that Ken and I were the only ones not speaking it that night. I swore we'd stepped into the local Ethiopian Mafia Headquarters. Tonight, though, we got there a little earlier in the evening, so the lights were actually turned on, and there were two other Americans - still black, though - in the joint. (When they asked for forks, the waitress looked down her nose at them and waved her hand in our general direction, indicating that if the gringos could eat with their fingers, so could they. Shamed, they dug in with their fingers.) This time, with the lights on, we could see that we were the only lefties using the wrong hand to scoop food, so we did our best to switch, but the pros only use one hand at all - to tear off bread, scoop, and eat. When the owner got up to greet other customers, he offered them his wrist instead of shaking hands - he was in the middle of a meal and his right hand was being used for a utensil. Ken left me to sleep off my cough some more and headed out for a night of poker. I was long gone by the time he returned. |
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