Las Vegas, New Mexico

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Las Vegas, New Mexico

Vegas, baby! Vegas!

Hours of driving through a sun-baked desert, but this is my exit.

I am so money.

Hmmm. I have to say, Vegas doesn't look like I remember it. What's with all the adobe? The empty storefronts? The ample on-street parking?

Can anyone tell me where the Bellagio is?

Judging from all the turquoise and the absence of high-roller asshole types, I may have miscalculated. And I'm okay with that.

I grab lunch at a great little Mexican cafe and then walk up to the street fair filling up the central plaza. There's a small crowd dancing to a tejano band's spanglish version of Mustang Sally. There's not a slot machine or an Elvis impersonator or anybody singing "My Way" within a hundred miles.

And I'm okay with that, too.

Viva Las Vegas. At least this one.

2 comments:

Tyler Green said...: Yay New Mexico!; July 7, 2009 at 7:47:00 AM PDT
mtpeke said...: I think I would prefer this Las Vegas!; July 7, 2009 at 8:53:00 AM PDT

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INTRODUCTION

For much of my adult life, I have been lucky enough to get paid doing the things I love most. My work as a itinerant travel and wildlife photographer has sent me around the world and across all seven continents.

Over the last two decades, I have had ample opportunity to appreciate the absurdities of life on the road, having once spent 27 memorable hours during my first trip to Kenya digging a bogged safari truck out using only a sauce pan. In addition to my work in Africa, I have traveled extensively in Alaska, Australia, Antarctica and Asia.

I hope to work my way through the rest of the alphabet in a timely fashion.

Each year, I spend five or six months on the road. Along the way, I try to make time to scribble something in my notebooks. More often than not, it’s about whatever mishap has befallen me on any particular day. This collection offers a random sample from those journals, notebooks and emails.