Bye-Bye, Las Vegas!

With our move (in theory) approaching in two weeks and our schedule between now and then pretty packed, we realized that our trip to Las Vegas on Friday might well be our last as a family. Darcy and I will make it in at least once for grocery shopping and to return our library books, but Michael probably won't be back unless we find a time to reschedule the tapas night out originally scheduled for Friday.

So it seemed fitting that we should drive the extra mile north on Las Vegas Boulevard from our library to pay homage to the oh-so-famous Las Vegas sign. For all those people (and there are lots -- I've seen long lines of people waiting their turn for pictures, whole wedding parties, wedding parties with an Elvis impersonator along for the ride) who want this classic snapshot, Las Vegas provides handy-dandy drive in/drive out parking. Very convenient!

Most people want the view featured in the first photo. We (ok, maybe I, because Michael seemed surprised when we got there) wanted the other side. The side that you see as you are leaving Las Vegas. Because that's pretty much what we'll be doing soon. We might not live in Las Vegas, but a lot of our public lives center on that city. Virtually all of our shopping and errands happen there. We use the Las Vegas parks and libraries. Darcy has play dates there. And all that is coming to an end. I don't mind that it's coming to an end; it's a long and not particularly exciting drive from Cima to Las Vegas. But it did seem fitting to mark the end of our odd relationship with Sin City. So here we are, with the sun in absolutely the wrong place, being wished Happy Trails by Las Vegas.


On the book front, I've now finished the heartbreaking, but beautifully written Grapes of Wrath. I knew most of the story from the movie, but it didn't stop me from having heart ache, both for the fictional Joads and for the hundreds of thousands of people who lived through many of the same things the Joads experienced. Ah, greed! What could our world be without your presence?

I'm taking a break from the more reading-list-like books for my next book. I've just started The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. It's a fairly light-hearted (at least so far) mystery narrated by a young man with autism.