Viva Las Vegas, Baby! If you’re gonna do up Vegas right, you gotta stay amidst the glitz and glitter of the Strip. So home for the week was the parking lot of gaudy casino Circus Circus. Not exactly High Roller digs, but it put us in strategic position for everything that this city is about. As luck would have it, we made it in time to catch up with my buddy Rob and some of our happy hour gang, all of whom had flown in for the weekend from Maryland. We hunkered down at Four Queens casino, where the blue dice were red hot at the craps table. The Marylanders won back a good chunk of their previous days’ losses while Holly and I looked on and chanted for them. Although the thought of winning some jack to extend our trip was alluring, we settled on the no-risk approach. For us, free booze was the best payout on the odds.

Unless you’ve been to Vegas before, you can’t quite prepare yourself for the kind of sensory overload that smacks you like a deck of cards to the nose. There are incessantly flashing lights, binging bells, mesmerizing interior decoration and pinballing pedestrians; if you can find a casino exit in less than 30 minutes, consider yourself a winner. The bewilderment extends beyond the casinos—even grocery stores and gas stations have the ostentatious slot machines installed in ‘em. Adding to the woozy atmosphere of the city is the fact that people can legally drink and smoke pretty much everywhere, at any time of the day. There’s no last call. Well after midnight, the streets and sidewalks are often more jam-packed than they were at noon. It makes it tricky to judge exactly what time of day it is.

Far from the Strip, Hoover Dam was a must-see for me. As we stood at the top and peered down to the water below, it was impossible not to marvel at the efforts required to build such a monstrosity. It’s breathtaking. How can it not be? There’s enough concrete in it to pave a four-foot sidewalk around the entire globe. The primary reason Hoover was built was for flood control, but there’s no thoughts about that right now. The lack of rainfall in this area over the last several years is obscene. The Dam is holding back Lake Mead which is down 90 feet from its normal water level. We heard about one marina’s plight of having to “chase the water.” They just spent four million dollars to move their business 12 miles down to the new waterline. To accomplish it, the pier had to be cut into four pieces, and then be reassembled.