What do you do when your college roommate is getting married (yay Beth!) in Northern California and you decide to road trip with your college friends?

You stop in Vegas. It was legitimately halfway. California is a deceptively long ways from New Mexico…you might think “oh, they’re all Western states.” Well, the West is HUGE. I had been the Las Vegas but I had never driven through Nevada before. That state is a national treasure, and I lump it into a category with New Orleans…a completely unique culture in the middle of the rest of America.

The first thing we did when we got to town was go see the art gallery at The Bellagio. It was Jamie’s idea, and I was so relieved when she suggested it. I am not really the gambling type, and to discover that there was something museum-y to do made my day. We walked in under a Chihuly glass sculpture.

My aversion to burning money through gambling did not stop me from being drawn in to the Jurassic Park slot machine area (because of course there is a Jurassic Park slot machine area), where I lost a dollar in record time. I then got away from the slots as fast as Dr. Grant running away from a flock of dinosaurs.

We happened upon the Pawn Stars shop from the fabled History Channel show, and wandered in. Oddly, Chum Lee (Chumly? Chumlee?) happened to be there “working” meaning he was taking selfies with a long line of people. Selfies are the new autographs, by the way. I took a distance selfie because I don’t wait in lines.

Then we proceeded to drive hundreds of miles through nothing aka Nevada, skirting Area 51 and being shocked that we could see brothels from the highway. As opposed to the opulence of Las Vegas, where even the public bathrooms were gilded in fake gold, prostitutes in Nevada are still forced to operate in trailers, apparently. Weird.

Dinner was its own adventure for the next blog post…