Monday, February 07, 2022

Stir Crazy

Yep, being trapped in the Fraser Valley, as wonderful as it is, for two years with nothing but a few trips to Calgary and a wonderful-but-too-short weekend in Ottawa, finally got to me.  I broke down and started driving south.  (Yes, I'm well aware that many people would kill for "a few trips to Calgary and a weekend in Ottawa.  I recognize my privilege. :-)

Las Vegas is a far cry from my "happy place" - my "happy place" needs to be either much more rugged and wild or not on this continent.  In many ways I think of Las Vegas as rather distasteful.  Still, in this instance it had a few things going for it:

  1. Sunshine in January.  When wintering in Vancouver, this one’s important to me!
  2. Great shows.  Yeah, I’m a sucker for Cirque du Soleil, and there are a bunch in Vegas.
  3. People willingly subsidizing my hotel room!  Vegas hotels can be remarkably cheap.
Now to explain a little.  This is kind-of a “working holiday”.  There are only two months left on my contract, so now is not the time to take time off.  But as I said, I was going stir crazy from lack of travel.  So because I’d be working during the day, and, being January/February, it would be dark after work, I was looking for somewhere that I could enjoy myself more in the evenings.  I thought about Arizona or California, but in the end it was the “night life” that influenced my decision most.  (Sorry, Dave - can't really golf after work. :-)  Also, I kinda wanted a nice, long road trip (as opposed to a flight), but no more than two days away so that I could make the trip down one weekend and the trip back the next.  Since Sue couldn’t join me due to her work being more in-person, I didn't want to be gone for too long.

On the way down I began making some observations that I thought I should capture.  The "Christian" one is at the end so that those of you that don't want to read that can easily skip it. :-)
  • It is truly amazing how much "waste land" there is in America.  Every time I drive to Vegas from anywhere I'm amazed by the amount of desert.  If you add to that the vast tracts of land not good enough to farm and not good enough to harvest lumber from (e.g. Alaska), it makes for a great deal of essentially uninhabited land.
  • The Vegas strip fills me with a mixture of awe and revulsion.  It's spectacular, but it's also hard to imagine more of a monument to conspicuous consumption based on greed.
  • Pricing for most hotels in Vegas is a joke, and it's important to go in with your eyes open.  I already knew this, but still got caught.  You see there's the room rate you'll see on Expedia or Hotels.com or whatever, and then there's the "resort fee" that almost all of them charge.  It's non-negotiable (as I learned on a previous trip).  Sure you'll see it if you read the fine print, but it won't be obvious and it won't be on the charge you see from Expedia.  Instead, they hit you with it when you check in.  Supposedly it covers things like parking and wifi, but this trip they actually took parking out and I had to pay for that separately, meaning that for all intents and purposes, the resort fee covered wifi.  So, here's the breakdown of a "cheap" room:
    • Room: C$24
    • Resort Fee:  C$58  - imagine... $58 for wifi!?!?!  And that's for a maximum of two devices.  Additional devices still cost another C$22/day!
    • Parking: C$22
    • Total:  C$104, not the $24 Expedia promised!!!
Still, at the end of the day, the room I had (which was very nice) was a small fraction of the cost the same room would have been in other cities.  Also, the room worked out very well as my "work space".  Of course that's a week-day rate.  The rate jumps to several times that on weekends.
  • Other room "amenities" are outrageous:  movie on demand?  US$20; streaming music (through the TV)?  US$10/day
  • If you remember eating cheaply in Vegas, either you are old or you avoided the strip.  Cheap food can still be found (e.g. I still enjoyed steak and lobster for US$12 at Tony Roma's, but it was on Fremont).  The cheap buffets are gone, and the restaurants have gone considerably upscale, with names like Gordon Ramsay or Hell's Kitchen.
  • As a Canadian travelling in the U.S. I'm often amazed at how different our technologies (in particular banking) are between the two countries.  Can you remember the last time you signed your name when making a credit card transaction in Canada?!?  That's still very common in the U.S.  Tap seems very rare, and I couldn't even get it to work.  We can't e-transfer money to friends there.  It makes me wonder how people feel about Canada when they're coming from places like Singapore or Japan where I assume technology is significantly more advanced.
  • I think The Who might be very ashamed of their generation now.  Perhaps more of us should have died before we got old.  I went to see Styx while I was in Vegas and made the mistake of going cheap and sitting in the balcony.  Note the word "sitting" - we were at a rock concert and everyone in the balcony stayed seated for the entire performance!  The show was much better than I expected, but sitting down is not what I go to concerts for!!!
  • If you've been to Vegas you know what the pedestrian traffic on the strip is like.  It's a vast sea of people.  Well, wanna know how to kill that traffic?  Take the temperature down to 4°C.  I thought it was nice, comfortable walking weather, but the sidewalks were deserted.  I certainly didn't complain - I don't like crowds.
  • More and more I believe that homelessness is an indictment of the west in general, and the church in particular.  It's bad in Vancouver, but increases significantly the further south one drives along the west coast.  Driving around significant swaths of downtown Portland can be eye-opening.  Miles of sidewalks have been taken over by tents.  Part of me wonders why it's tolerated, part of me wonders why more isn't done, and part of me wonders "where is the church in all of this?"  This is particularly true in the U.S. where the church tries to take such an active role in society and politics.  The church I observe must understand the Bible very differently from the way I do.  Oh right - our "Christian" leaders are too busy building fancy mega-churches and flying around in private jets, supporting the antithesis of Christ politically, and obviously much too important to be concerned about the people living in tents on the sidewalk in Portland.  Although Portland was a jolt, and Canada doesn't pretend to be a "Christian nation", surely the sheer number of people in Vancouver's downtown eastside is still an indictment of our church as well.  But at the same time it makes me wonder how much I do or what more I should do.  I feel a little helpless since the problem seems to be so huge and I'm sure many others with much more knowledge and insight have tried to solve it, but still I am not innocent in this.