Family, Friends and Food

I know I haven't written in a week but I have just been simply too busy with family, friends, and food (too much food) this week. I was barely able to squeeze in dialysis, but I did. Tuesday's dialysis in Oklahoma City was pretty uneventful and went smoothly. They got me below my dry weight and I felt great. The people at the center were very professional and very nice. Right after dialysis we met family Gabriel didn't even know he had until recently, the daughter and granddaughter of his cousin Valerie in Cincinnati. We met them for dinner at a nice Italian restaurant in Oklahoma City (it seems everything we do revolves around food), and they were wonderful people and I really enjoyed meeting them. We drove that night after dinner for a couple of hours and spent the night in Sallisaw, OK, which has 9,000 people and 29 churches, our first notch in the Bible Belt. One night later we were in Memphis, where we had to wake up at 4:30AM to get to dialysis on Thursday, my birthday. Memphis was not my favorite city, the dialysis unit however was a very pleasant atmosphere, again an uneventful treatment. I slept through most of it including when they delivered flowers sent by my daughters and signed by my grandsons Eric, Ethan, and Nate. A pleasant surprise and a beautiful bouquet. Right after dialysis we had a great barbecue lunch at Corky's in Memphis, where we also ate dinner the night before. It was the first time I had dry-rubbed ribs, and they were the best. That afternoon we drove to Nashville, which I really liked. We parked in front of the Ryman Auditorium, once the home of the Grand Ole Opry, and yes, Neil Young performed there too. I loved Nashville, the vibrancy, the party atmosphere that it supplied, a musician everywhere you walked, carrying a guitar case. We enjoyed driving around the city and getting a feel for it, a feeling of welcoming comfort. The next day we got to Cincinnati and finally met Gabriel's cousin Valerie. What a sweetheart! We hit it off immediately. If she weren't family we'd instantly be friends, I could tell. She fixed us the most wonderful home-cooked meal that tasted better than anything I'd eaten in a week. It was so much fun that we stayed up talking until well after midnight even though we had to get up at 5:30 to get to dialysis, my last dialysis treatment on the road. I hated waking her up in the morning to say goodbye, but she insisted. It was goodbye but not forever. We'll be in touch and visiting each other again. My last dialysis treatment Saturday morning in Cincinnati was -- I hate to sound like a broken record -- uneventful. I want people to know that the entire dialysis experience on this trip went smoothly. A couple of minor glitches but nothing that couldn't be dealt with, and I would encourage anybody on dialysis to travel. Don't be afraid. It requires planning, yes, but it can be done. We've proved it!

And Then There Were Four

And now just four days remain. We’ve been on the move the last few days, covering five states in three days: New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Tennessee. In Oklahoma we met two previously unmet cousins for a great dinner, the prelude to meeting my first cousin Valerie in Cincinnati later today. In Arkansas we got a tour of the incredible John Rogers Photo Archive, the largest photo collection in the world (and growing more massive all the time, including the recent addition of over 1,700 linear feet of images from the Miami Herald. In Memphis we did something we’ve been looking forward to all trip: eating real barbecue. We solicited opinions all over the country about where to get the best barbecue, and the vote was split between Rendezvous and Corky’s. Corky’s was a more convenient location—not far from where Linda had dialysis—so we went with that for dinner on Wednesday. We liked it so much that we went back for lunch yesterday. Though Linda loved the dry rub on the little rack of ribs she devoured, we wound up buying four bottles of their original barbecue sauce to take home. And the lemon icebox pie was delicious, too. So Corky’s gets our vote if you’re taking a survey.

It was very muggy when we got to Nashville yesterday afternoon, temperature in the high 80s and humidity no doubt higher, so we didn’t walk around the “music city” center of town. But I did find a parking spot in the shade across the street from the Ryman Theater, where Linda could be reasonably comfortable while I bopped around the area taking photos. There was a bluegrass festival going on, and I got several good shots of musicians old and young lugging their instruments to various gigs and events, from an elderly man with a banjo case slung over his shoulder to a 20ish kid and his bull fiddle case. Along Lower Broadway is a string of clubs where country music was pouring forth from every doorway, with the bands on stages just inside the front door to lure passersby inside. It reminded me of Bourbon Street in New Orleans, and even though I’m not a country music fan, my soul was gladdened at so much music being made in public in the middle of the afternoon.

We drove around Nashville for an hour or so, taking in some of the neighborhoods as well as the Bicentennial Park with its terrific views up the hill to the state capital. Nashville captivated us in a way that Memphis did not. In the latter city, we drove out to Graceland but weren’t up for a big walking tour and didn’t feel like paying $10 for parking just for a glimpse at the mansion. We saw his two airplanes from the road, but wound up getting much more enjoyment from a nearby neighborhood (including Tranquil Lane) with some beautiful stone work and mailboxes embedded in brick.

It was rush hour when we left Nashville and it looked like we’d get stuck in a big traffic jam, but I guessed right on taking Rosa Parks Boulevard as an escape route, bypassing the worst of the jam and getting on I-65 heading north. We drove about 100 miles and have stopped here in Cave City, Kentucky, where it rained all night but we didn’t care. After the long drives of the past few days, I slept ten hours, and Linda outdid me. We had skipped dinner but didn’t care, still stuffed from Corky’s. It rained all night and I heard thunder on and off, but Linda didn’t hear a thing. We must have needed the rest, and now we’re geared up for the final push—a relaxing day today with my cousin in Cincinnati, Linda’s final dialysis “on the road” tomorrow morning in Cincy, followed by a full-afternoon drive to reach our friends Jan and Judy Finkel for more relaxation in western Maryland. That will leave the final day on Monday, as we begin October by finishing what we began the first day of September—the greatest trip we’ve ever taken.

One Week To Go

Today Linda and I begin the final week of our 31-day odyssey. One week from right now, she'll be finishing her first dialysis back in her home unit at Bassett Hospital in Cooperstown. Right now she's getting dialysis in Oklahoma City, the eighth of ten centers we're visiting on the road. Her final two treatments--in Memphis and Cincinnati--will both start very early in the morning, around 5:30am. Won't that be fun!

It has been a long trip, and I'll admit that we're starting to feel it. The last two days were long ones on the road, as we covered 900 miles between Williams, Arizona, and Oklahoma City. We did take the time for a one-hour detour on Sunday to drive through Petrified Forest National Park and the Painted Desert, the last parks we'll visit. That was far from the last of the great scenery; all the way across New Mexico on I-40, we saw red rocks, mountains, verdant hillsides, and desert flora. I know that the most scenic parts of New Mexico are not on I-40, but it more than sufficed for our Sunday drive.

Yesterday we began in Santa Rosa, NM, and soon enough were in Texas, crossing the panhandle with a stop for lunch in Amarillo before finishing up in Oklahoma. The theme for the day was wind, a strong, not crosswind for the past day and a half, blowing south to north at 20-30mph. The trees along the highway were bent against it, and by the end of the day my hands were sore from gripping the steering wheel more tightly to guard against gusts. A few times we drove through clouds of dust, and though we were hardly the Joad family in our air-conditioned Toyota, we could get a feel for what it must have been like in the 1930s "Dust Bowl" as unrelenting wind blew the dusty earth every which way, scattering citizens along the way. This is not a place where we could live, we agreed. The people are friendly enough, but the flat land and steady winds don't capture us the way the colorful geology of the southwest did.

So the mission for the last two days was to make the 900-mile trek and give us a chance to relax today. The only thing on our schedule today is dinner with two cousins I've never met--the daughter and granddaughter of the cousin I've never met either. Friday is our day to meet my first cousin Valerie, and by then we'll be old friends of the family, or the side of the family that was missing from my life for about 30 years.  Does it count as a reunion if you've never met? Whatever you call it, we're looking forward to the dinner before continuing our eastward, home-bound journey.

How tired are we after more than three weeks on the road and no home cooking in two weeks? The other night, after checking into a motel in Santa Rosa, we wanted to do some laundry. We took the clothes and detergent over to the laundry room and loaded everything up. I put seven quarters in the washer and headed back to the room while Linda played with the clothes. We gave the washer a half-hour, and then I went back there to move everything over to the dryer. But no. Linda had forgotten to push in the coin slot, so the washer never started. I started it, gave it a half-hour, and went back to put everything in the dryer. So far, so good. I even put the seven quarters in the dryer's slot before returning to the room to wait it out. But I couldn't get the dryer to start. I pounded the buttons again and again, but nothing. So I hied myself to the motel office to break the news that their dryer wouldn't start. The clerk was very helpful, promising to get the maintenance man to unlock the motel's private laundry room so I could dry our clothes.

About the time I got back to our room, I remembered. . .yeah, I forgot to push the damn coin slot in. It worked like a charm once I made yet another march over there and pushed the coins in. The dryer started, and I raced back in time to see the maintenance man unlocking a door. I apologized for disturbing his evening rest, but I was laughing by the time I got back to our room. "It's a beautiful thing," I told Linda, "to have a marriage between equals." Yes, equally brain-dead after all those days spent wandering the infinitely fascinating but very hot (100+ degrees on three different days) southwest. Now we're looking forward to the fall color and the football weather which will no doubt greet us on our return to central New York.

We still have plenty to do on the road, including Linda's birthday on Thursday, various cousins, a weekend with our friends Jan and Judy Finkel in western Maryland, and a final stop next Monday on the way home to visit more friends near Harrisburg, PA. If the saying is true that you can have too much of a good thing, then we'll just have to take our chances this final week. We're just about full to the brim and have had a fantastic time, but physically it's starting to catch up to us. But at least we don't have to do any more laundry.

You Have To Take Chances in Las Vegas

Life is full of gambles, no certainties, you take a roll of the dice, just one more card, just one more spin of the wheel, but taking that chance is life. Without that chance what would life be like, I'll tell you: BORING. Kidney failure was not something I would have bet on, or even wished for, but it was the hand I was dealt, so I play the cards I was dealt. I always say kidney failure is what I have, not who I am. I am going to continue to draw cards till they run out, I hope it takes a long, long time. Now onto my last dialysis treatment on Saturday in Las Vegas. I was in awe of the size on the unit, 40 chairs, a DaVita unit. There are also 18 more in Vegas along with a few Fresenius units and a few hospital units. Of course Las Vegas is the largest city I have been in so far on the trip (approximately 1.5 million people). At first I kind of felt like a cow in a large milking parlor, they go down the row and stick the needles in and hook you up, it was all done with care and professionalism, but nevertheless, quickly and without much personal attention. I felt safe and secure, just not like a welcomed patient, but with so many patients I can see how that would be the case. I had an uneventful treatment, just like I like them. I did notice lots of posters and art work around the room, indicating that the patient is first and foremost and special and so on, put I didn't feel any of the camaraderie between staff and patient that my home unit has.Now that is special, and I miss my home unit a lot. I have had good, even great experiences on the road, but there is no place like home. I miss all my dialysis buddies too. I'll be home soon. Love to all♥♥♥

Just Like Old Times

We've visited many places on this trip where I've spent a lot of time in my life, but none as much as Las Vegas, where I lived for 14 years (apparently I broke two mirrors). Linda and I spent nearly a week there in 2004, doing most of the tourist things like casino-hopping, gawking at the Fremont Experience light show, and joining thousands of other tourists in wandering up and down The Strip, trying to take it all in. This time we spent 44 hours there, and except for one joyride up and down the length of The Strip and a bit of gambling, we avoided the touristo routine. We stayed at Sam's Town, where I worked for several years, did our minimal gambling there (we lost a combined $42—I finished 19^th out of 40 players in a hold’em tournament, and Linda fed some slot machines), ate a couple of meals in the casino, and enjoyed our room very much. On the tourist front, it was a satisfying two days of sanity.

Our dinner Friday night was our main reason for coming to Las Vegas at all this time around. Since we were in the middle of nowhere (Cameron, Arizona) for our anniversary last Saturday, I wanted to have a special, official anniversary dinner consisting of my favorite restaurant meal ever, with my two best Las Vegas friends and their wives. We rendezvoused around 6PM at the California Hotel downtown for dinner at the Redwood Bar & Grill, where I first had their lobster thermidor in the 1980s. It's the most scrumptious meal I've ever had, and it was as fantastic as ever last night. It included a huge amount of succulent lobster-tail meat (Linda estimated that it was a three-pound lobster) covered in a rich, mouth-watering cream sauce with sherry and mushrooms. I took my time savoring each bite of it, and when the lobster vanished I soaked up the remaining sauce with a piece of bread. I didn't want to miss a molecule of that taste.

We were joined by my old friends George and Stew, whom I've known for more than 30 years. I've known George since 1980, when we worked at the old Bingo Palace, my first poker job. I met his buddy Stew a year later. They had come to Las Vegas in 1975 from Pittsburgh and, except for a year or so that George spent in Hawaii in the mid-1980s, they've lived there ever since. George worked mainly in the poker industry, while Stew got out of poker early on and has been an investment broker ever since. For many years we played a table-top baseball game for which I created the cards. Four of us (the fourth, Tim, moved away in 2000, five years after I left LV) would gather on Friday evenings to play 36-game seasons (six or nine games a week) about which I could easily and might someday write a book. Most of the time our lives were chaotic and our relationships unstable, and some of those diceball nights were group therapy as much as anything else. The four of us have now tallied ten marriages, but we have all gotten it right this time around. This dinner was the first time Linda and I met George's wife Angela and Stew's wife Lori, so it was a happy occasion all the way around. For the record, Stew and I had the thermidor, Angela had a lobster tail, the others had steak, and everything was terrific. It was a meal we'll remember for a long time, a festive reunion (I hadn't seen Stew since the 2004 trip, or George since he visited us in Cooperstown in 2008) and a fine anniversary celebration.

We have other shared interests besides baseball, of course, and I was happy to join both Stew and George in their favorite extracurricular passions during this whirlwind stay. Later Friday night, I joined Stew at a bar not far from Sam's Town for some karaoke. Stew is the most fanatical Moody Blues devotee you can imagine, in fact the most fanatical devotee of any musical group I've ever known. He's seen them in concert a couple of dozen times, has met them on several occasions, and raised his son Alex to revere them as well. Stew is also a terrific singer who has performed dozens of Moody Blues songs in public (billed as Moody Stew), and was part of a professional karaoke troupe that performed regularly at the old Showboat Hotel. His rich baritone is especially suited to the songs written by Justin Hayward, and his rendition of "Nights in White Satin" is particularly moving. When Linda and I were here in 2004, Stew regaled us to a personal concert, singing about 20 Moody Blues songs to us, a cappella.

Last night Linda asked him to perform her favorite Moody Blues song, "Questions," but unfortunately felt too tired after dinner to stay out, so I took her back to the room at Sam's Town before joining Stew. Plan B worked: I filmed him singing "Questions" on our digital camera, so Linda got to watch his performance later. It was as wonderful as ever. After that, we waited more than an hour at the karaoke while other singers (most of them very good) performed, before I got to film Stew singing the song I requested, another early favorite, "The Actor." He said afterwards that he never sang it better, and I agree. Fantastic!

Next March, Stew is going to live out his greatest and longest-standing dream. The Moody Blues are staging a five-night Caribbean cruise for their fans, and Stew and Lori will be going. There will be special concerts, a private dinner with the band and their families, and other MB-related events. Stew was ecstatic when they purchased the tickets, but he was beside himself a few days later when he received an e-mail informing him that there will be a MB-only karaoke night on the cruise. "Brush up on your 'Nights in White Satin,’" the e-mail advised, and Stew just about fainted. His #2 daydream in life has been to sing "Nights" for Justin Hayward, and he will have his chance. He can hardly wait. He'll also have a chance to go for daydream #1. For two decades he has been an avid off-road camper, traveling primarily to remote areas of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. I joined him for one of those five-day trips in 1998 and will never forget the incredible panoramas, not to mention the adventure of camping in a place that few other people have ever visited. Stew is going to ask the Moodies to join him at the Grand Canyon. He knows they have an interest in the US Southwest, and he truly is the best person to take them out there. If they joined him for just one weekend, they'd find abundant inspiration to write enough songs to fill a CD. Good luck on that one, Stew! It was a joy to see him still pinching himself over the possibilities.

Linda and I had a tough night Friday night. You've read about the miscalculation in her dry weight at Thursday's dialysis, and Friday night she paid the price, being unable to breathe comfortably (from excess fluid that wasn't dialyzed on Thursday). She hardly slept at all, and I didn't do much better, partly from concern for her and partly from my own battle with acid reflux, triggered by the thermidor and the one drink I had before dinner. So we were both shaky when I took her to dialysis at 6:30 yesterday morning. Nevertheless, I was raring to go when George picked me up at 7am to dabble in a little golf.

I'm a lifelong duffer whose only discernible skill is putting. George is a legitimate golfer who has had a single-digit handicap on and off, has traveled to Scotland to play St. Andrew's and the other great courses there, has attended the Masters, and has notched a hole-in-one. I haven't played golf in a long time but I can still putt, and Las Vegas has long had one of the world's best putting-only courses. Located at the Angel Park golf club, the course used to be 18 holes but has been whittled down to 9. The holes are difficult, ranging from 50 feet in length to over 100, with many undulations, sweeping hooks, and even sand traps. It's a tough course, though two or three of the remaining 9 holes are fairly straight putts of 50-60 feet.

The sprinklers were still going on the 1st hole when George and I started playing, and we had to duck the water in order to move along. We played the 9-hole layout four times, and did better with each round, especially after I woke up and regained some kind of touch. I'd say par for 9 holes would be 20 or 21. George, a fierce competitor who doesn't give anything away, played solidly throughout, scoring 20-19-19-20. In his middle two rounds, he made 3 on the 1^st hole and all 2s after that. We joked that we’d keep playing until someone made a deuce at the 100-foot opener. (We both did in the fourth round.) I shot 24-21-23 in the first three rounds, but had my best stretch of putting ever during the final 9. I played every hole in two shots to score an 18 and gain my lone 9-hole victory. I put several of the long approach putts within two or three feet, and made a 12-footer to keep my streak of deuces going (I finished with 12 in a row). That felt good,  beating George but even more so for making so many good putts on a tough little course. Best of all, we got to spend a few hours together, reminiscing, philosophizing, and competing.

Linda had a good dialysis treatment during which they got her dry weight a little below its normal figure, setting her up for a comfortable weekend. We were both very tired from too-little sleep, however, so after we reached Williams, Arizona, late yesterday afternoon, we decided not to hurry up to the South Rim of the Canyon for another look. We rested instead before two long days of driving to get to Oklahoma City (900 miles distant) for Tuesday's dialysis.

This morning we had another treat.  We had breakfast in Flagstaff with Stew’s son Alex, who was only 12 the last time we were in the vicinity. He’s an impressive young man who has inherited the family’s musical skill and then some. Stew’s father was a classical pianist and composer, and young Alex anchors the bass register of every choir and singing group on the campus of Northern Arizona University. As Stew told me the night before, “I’m a good amateur, but Alex is a pro. He could be a pop singer, an opera singer, anything.” Alex confirmed that professors have told him as much, but he wants to teach at the high school level so he can help young people through music. You have to admire a 20-year-old with that combination of talent and purpose.

Breakfast with Alex was a great post-script to the Las Vegas visit, which was a tribute to my past, to 30 years ago when I first became good friends with Stew and George. Everybody is doing fine, and the reunion was as delicious as the thermidor. You can’t ask for much more than

Dialysis in St.George, Utah, and a Couple of Problems

I am taking Coumadin, a blood thinner, if you take it you already know that you must moniter your blood levels, with a test called a PT/INR. A normal reading would be between 2 and 3. I had my PT/INR drawn on Tuesday in St. George at dialysis. I went to dialysis on Thursday morning, and when I showed up I was told by the head nurse that my reading came back 11. Dr. LeCates (my prime nephrologist) was trying to reach me to tell me to go immediately to an ER, as it is lethal, at those numbers you could bleed to death. Another PT/INR was drawn and sent stat to the lab., it came back very normal, as it happened I was given Heparin (usually administered during treatment, to prevent clots) before the first PT/INR was drawn, causing a high reading. I didn't panic because I felt it was a bad reading, however everybody involved was a little worried. Dr. LeCates called me at dialysis that morning laying out a plan if the test came back with high numbers. Up until now on the TRIP OF A LIFETIME my dialysis treatments have gone very smoothly, I just wanted you to know there is a fly in the ointment once in a while. One more little problem, I had a very new nurse stick me Thursday. She did a wonderful job. We discussed my weight gain (2.4. kilos) and decided to take me down and additional .5 to get me under my dry weight, which is what I prefer, but instead I came off the machine 1.2 kilos over. I think she put the numbers in the computer wrong, just another little glitch in the works. Oh well, like Gabriel is fond of saying, all days are not created equal. Of all the things that could go wrong, this is nothing. I did not anticipate any problems on this trip and I don't buy into trouble before I have to, that's how I keep my cheerful disposition. Now onto Las Vegas, that's another blog, stay tuned. Love to all. ♥♥♥

From the Sublime To the Ridiculous

Linda and I have completed Part Two of our 31-day trip, the part I've thought of as exploration. On September 10, we saw our first red-rock canyon of the trip--Glenwood Canyon in central Colorado--and began traversing various parks in southern Utah and northern Arizona. In nine days, we saw Arches NP, Dead Horse Point State Park, Monument Valley, Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell, both rims of the Grand Canyon, Zion NP, Bryce NP, Cedar Breaks National Monument, Snow Canyon State Park, and points in between that were also breathtaking. We saw elk at the South Rim, Navajo in Tuba City, bighorn sheep in Zion, a zillion German-speaking tourists wherever we went, a flock of about a thousand sheep in Cedar Breaks, a mining operation at the otherwise barren Dead Horse Point, and buffalo in two spots, and read half of Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang while in many of the settings in the novel. And a whole lot more. We can hardly believe we did all this in the past nine days.

After Linda's dialysis this morning in St. George, Utah, we went to Snow Canyon, a small state park which combines an amazing number of geological features in a relative small area: sandstone red rock, limestone white rock, black volcanic lava, petrified sand dunes, and plain old desert with patches of sagebrush. We found some shade in a picnic area and read Abbey for an hour before saying goodbye to the neatness of Utah and heading southwest for a couple of hours to Las Vegas. The temperature reached 102 on the drive, and at 9pm it's still 88. Not too bad considering that back home in upstate New York it was 50 degrees and rainy yesterday. Linda says it might be very tough to go back.

It's hard to imagine two locales more different than Las Vegas and, well, almost anywhere we've been for the past nine days. And it didn't take long to compile a fair amount of fresh evidence about the strangeness of this city where I lived for 14 years (1980-1995, with one year off for an extended research visit to the library at the Baseball Hall of Fame). As tourists this time, we're staying at Sam's Town, where I worked on and off from 1987-1994. I visited the (relocated) poker room where I worked and was proud to see that they are still running the promotion I helped create a quarter-century ago. One employee from our original 1987 crew is still there; as the day shift boss, I hired him as a dealer, and now he's the day shift boss. Tomorrow morning I'm going to go in there and scare the shit out of him, the ghost of hold'em past.

After a meal at Sam's Town, we went for a three-hour drive around the city, starting with Sunrise Mountain to the east, from which we looked down at the sprawling city as the sun set and its light was replaced by the colorful sweep of Las Vegas neon. Then we headed downtown and took the long drive down Las Vegas Boulevard and the whole length of The Strip. We passed a dozen wedding chapels, including a couple where an Elvis impersonator will perform the service, and thousand of tourists wandering around in a neon daze as they craned their necks at the ever-growing number of monstrously huge casinos. Linda likened it to Times Square, except that the people in New York seem to be going somewhere all the time, while people visiting Las Vegas spent a lot of time looking lost.

We saw three things which, to me, sum up Las Vegas' supremacy in the realm of indulging any excess. First was the woman we saw seated upon a rolling walker at Sam's Town, watching a friend of hers play a slot machine. The woman was a burly 75-year-old with white hair knotted atop her head, wearing a short leopard-print sundress with spaghetti straps which kept slipping down, a shell necklace, and black sneakers and socks, and drinking a glass of red wine. She looked like Barney Rubble in drag. The natives didn't give her a second thought.

Second was a small church building on East Charleston Boulevard. On the door it is identified as the Living Faith Assembly, God's Family Church, where "Our purpose is to love God and glorify him thereby." The lights were off this evening and nobody was inside the building, but there was a steady stream of cars entering the parking lot. Why? Because attached to the outside of the church is a Wells Fargo Bank express ATM machine. That explains why the information on the door includes the assurance that this church is "non-denominational." Yep, they'll accept any denomination there: fives, tens, twenties, or hundreds.

Last up was the business establishment in downtown Las Vegas whose marquee caused us both to do a triple-take. It is called the "Heart Attack Grill" and it proclaims "Over 350 lbs? Eat here free." Underneath that generous offer is this tempting come-on: "Ask about our liposuction lottery." We really don't want to ask, thank you. But that's Vegas. Any compulsion, obsession, or self-destructive behavior will be encouraged, aided and abetted. This may even be the last bastion where smoking is allowed in a public place, providing me with a nostalgic chance to inhale the stench of a cheap cigar in the cheap slot-machine area. No problem. Just come inside--and bring all those denominations with you.

On Wednesday we were transfixed by the delicate orange-white pinnacles of Bryce Canyon, the towering ridges of Zion, and many other natural wonders. One day later, I found myself trying to figure out how a new casino like the Cosmopolitan can stay afloat. Someone bought the property next to the massive Bellagio and decided that the only way to compete was to build something even more massive. They also realized that the only color not used yet for a mega-casino's primary color was kelly blue, so that's the color of the horizontal bars of neon 30 or 40 stories up or however tall it is. That's how it goes in Las Vegas, where immediate visual gratification is supreme, and once you are on the premises they'll do everything they can to keep you there. Sam's Town, a quaint Western-themed neighborhood casino when I first set foot in it 30 years ago, now has a McDonald's, a Subway, a Dunkin' Donuts, and several other fast-food places right on the premises, inside the casino, in addition to its own dining establishments.

No, despite the efforts of the Living Faith Assembly, I don't think I'm going to find God in a desert of neon where a 400-pound man can get a free lunch. I'm much more likely to find divinity in the marvels of the Utah and Arizona canyons which took millions of years to create magnificent vistas.