Day 10: Final Leg of the Dramatic Crossing
The evening in Las Vegas wasn’t bad. The strip was pretty impressive in a sort of Times Square, car crash sort of way.
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I Give Up
For dinner on Tuesday, I went to Denny’s. It was half the price of the “quality” restaurants I’d visited west of New Orleans, and the food was just as good. It’s not right, but it is.
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Half Dollar or Hard Candy Shell?
For some reason during this trek, just about every time I’ve travelled through a city at non-highway speeds, I’ve been treated to quite the range of current and past rap hits. I don’t feel quite as strongly about this as I do the g-string thing, but my opinion is fairly firm. Eminem has the best rhymes and the worst voice. [Until a few months ago, I hadn’t really thought about the fact that rappers generally avoid singing. (Thanks for the heads-up John.) Sadly, when I walked along the strip, I heard an Eminem song I’d forgotten about in which he ignores that rule.] While Eminem’s voice rates a C- for rapping, he doesn’t pass the singing test. On the other hand, 50 Cent is an A+ for rap, and to date, as far as I know, he hasn’t exposed himself by recording his singing voice. I thank him for saving me that pain. The usual suspects are honorable mentions on my list: Snoop (Calvin?), Tupac (though not his original name, it is on his birth certificate), Ol’ Dirty Bastard (Russell?). It occurs to me that maybe gangsta rappers are forced to that field because of their names. If I were named Calvin, I’d be interested in anything that made me seem a little tougher.
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California Love
Early start out of Las Vegas. Avoided I15 until I was 30 miles out of the city. By this point, the highway was fairly quiet. It was 84 degrees at the start. The temperature dropped as the road climbed to 6,000 feet and rose again as the road returned to the Mojave (dotted by Joshua trees that kept a respectful distance from each other). The cross winds were a little scary when combined with truckers whipping by. (I was going speed limit–70 mph–they must have been at 85 mph or more.)
After all of that, I10 finally arrived. If traffic had been bad anywhere on the trip before, it didn’t compare to the traffic created by the nutcases heading to LA. When the La Brea exit was finally in striking distance, I started moving to the right lane. I suppose the car behind me thought I was slowing down too much. He passed me with just a foot of clearance off my rear tire, in heavy traffic. I’d purposely timed my arrival so there was no chance of being remotely close to rush hour. It didn’t seem to matter. The drivers were still psychotic. The only fun part of the drive was the trip through town on Santa Monica. Traffic was slow enough and controlled enough to actually allow me to enjoy the ride down the strip.
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I Repeat, I Say Again, I Reiterate
My evening in Las Vegas reminded me that sometimes you can’t repeat a thing too much: g-strings are a no-no for everyone. Please help ensure the survival of a civilization worthy of passing on to our children (who are our future, I’ve been told) by adhering to that simple rule.
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Left Coast Evening Number 1
Plenty of frolicking and happiness accompanied by drinks at East West and a decision to save the real party for this weekend.
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Working Out
Justine came along eight years ago for a trip that was supposed to take place seven years ago. Runners (and other athletes?) use a concept called “saving the workout” to describe what to do when you are having an extremely bad day. That’s a day when, for whatever reason, mental or physical, you cannot make it through a key, planned workout. You adjust the workout somehow, such as shortening it or slowing it down, to emphasize some other training aspect (speed rather than endurance or recovery versus hills). I think this workout is now officially complete.