In all the trips I've made to Vegas, I have only ventured outside of a casino's immediate vicinity twice: once when I took Sam to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway for his birthday so he could race around the track a few times in a real Nascar car (is that redundant?), and the other, last December, when my dad suggested we all go out to the Valley of Fire.
I will freely admit now that I was totally bearish on the idea, even though I feigned enthusiasm at the time--why would I come to Vegas, the den of all that is false, and ruin the illusion by communing with nature? But my dad, an avid photographer, was so excited about the side excursion that I, nor anyone else, could bear to let on that we would rather be indoors, parked at a slot machine, drinking cocktails, and taking in Vegas as the rest of the tourist world does.
Weeks prior to the trip, he looked up various state parks around Las Vegas, settled on the Valley of Fire, researched specific vista points, driving trails, spots of interest. Before we even touched down in Las Vegas, he was already an expert tour guide.
So we drove northeast one morning after a quick breakfast, watched all the megatowers and the iconic "skyline" shrink smaller and smaller until we were no longer in recognizable Vegas. Instead, we were in the desert, and within an hour, arrived at the Valley of Fire.
Though the name of the park may sound overly dramatic, the landscape actually lived up to its name. We had traded oversized casinos for oversized tors of blood red and navel orange rock formations. From vista to vista, I felt like I could have been on Mars. My dad wielded his camera like a surgeon with his scalpel, and we left after a few hours with an impressive set of pictures and a voraciously growing appetite for food and gambling.
I look back on this trip as one of my favorite, and one of the few where I absolutely did not want to leave. As much as I love this city, I can only handle it in moderated doses, and usually after three days, I would long for some semblance of normalcy, where nothing is overlit, silence is valued, and money is money.
I'm not sure if it was the side trip away from the main tourist drag, or if it was because I was there with my parents and my boyfriend for the first time, of if it was because of the leisurely pace we took throughout our time there, but I came back home refreshed and in love with life. And I learned to appreciate and respect the fact that Las Vegas is more than its casinos. So in the spirit of exploration, our first dinner in the city last night was at a spectacular Thai restaurant in a little strip mall several blocks off of the main tourist path, nestled between a karaoke bar, a gay bathhouse, a straight bathhouse (believe it or not, they exist), an LGBT community center, and several bars of ill-looking-repute. All co-existing peacefully.
Who says Vegas is one-dimensional?
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