The Garden of the Blind

Saturday I was in Las Vegas, which was great. I had the best experience that I’ve ever had getting to and from the Strip. I was traveling downtown from Summerlin, which is in the northwest part of town. For the last mile or so of the Summerlin Expressway, there was stop and go traffic (mostly stop). It turns out that there was construction on the on ramp, and in the same place, there had been an accident, so that four lanes were being narrowed down into one lane. Well, after sitting in this for half an hour or so, we were to the point where two of the lanes were gone, but for some reason, there were still three rows of cars. Eventually, jersey barriers forced the third lane down, and when we went to one lane, the car that was supposed to go ahead of me couldn’t figure out how to merge. And I thought Utah drivers had problems.

Well, we got to the strip with only a little bit of congested traffic and found our way to the right casino. We were supposed to pick up some people, and were told that they were waiting in the parking garage on the casino level. So, I drove around the lower level of the parking garage, and there was no sign of them. I then dropped down a level and found myself heading out of the garage. The last thing in the world I wanted (or so I thought, but it turned out that there were worse things) was to get onto the Strip, so I pulled around and started back in. I meandered briefly and found myself in a line for valet parking. A guy came up and stuck something on my windshield before I could explain that we were in the wrong place. Since it would take half an hour for the line of cars in front of us to clear out, we were told to pull onto the sidewalk that was right there and just drive to safety. And watching all of this from the end of the sidewalk were the friends we were supposed to pick up. They were laughing at us, until we started cursing them out for giving us a) bad directions to b) a poorly chosen place to do a pick up.

Driving karma kicked in at that point, and I had no problem getting to our next stop (on the far end of the Strip), and the randomly chosen parking space I ended up with was just 50 feet from the door, which was again about 50 feet from where we were meeting up again. It was perfect. Then, on the way out, we hit no traffic until we were on the freeway. I tell you, it was unbelievable. I managed to make a nice visit to the Strip without actually travelling on it at any time.

More on my trip later.