My aunt Debbie lives in North Las Vegas and graciously allowed Britt and I to stay the night with her and her boyfriend Danny. Gracious isn't the right word. We rolled in some time after one in the morning, where we were greeted with news of separate beds, hot showers and an offer to do our laundry. Britt actually got down on her knees and bowed. The house was a gorgeous two-story house, the kind with cream stucco walls and red tile roof, and a real grass lawn in the backyard. Never really thought about it, but I guess that's a big deal out here. I would have brought her some plants from home if I'd known. She even had a few cacti. They were the only ones we'd seen so far, so I told Danny he needed to keep an eye on them in case Britt took too strong a liking to them. My aunt took us on a tour of the house, bringing us up to her balcony where we could see the lights of the Strip. We're invited over for some prime seating on a fourth of July, when all the casinos shoot of a massive fireworks display from their rooftops.
Danny went out to grab us some food while we sat on her porch with a bottle of wine, relaxing like we'd never relaxed before. Even though Heceta Head was lovely, it felt like "consider yourselves at home, but don't forget there are ten other people here too." Here, we really felt like we could. Dinner was taquitos, nachos and some drink I'd never heard of, hortchata, which was sweet, delicious and better than the version Britt had in Mexico. Probably because it was lacking in parasites. Afterwards, we went back to the porch to listen to Danny's stories of being a cab driver in Las Vegas. Apparently there's a huge hired transportation mafia owned by a few families, and any idea someone brings to the city to start their own company gets stolen by them. There's a party a few hours outside of the city where it's totally okay to use and buy drugs at as long as you get there by taxi, limo or helicopter. You heard me. Also? The whole thing about "massage parlors"? Totally true. The whole "what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" mentality seems to be the backbone of the culture here. And it's not just "I got drunk, made an ass of myself and got hitched," like I always assumed, but the living, breathing center for rule 34. I won't repeat any of the actual stories he told us, but Oh. My. God. By the end of his horror tales, both Britt and my jaws were hurting from gaping in shock for so long.
There were good stories too, though. He's been the driver for couples wanting to get married, participated in the ceremonies and been in their pictures. One time, Danny picked up a guy who had won $400,000. They chatted for a while, then they guy told him to head for some super fancy car museum and go with him to pick up his dream car. The guy paid cash for some super vintage car with super low miles (we were drinking wine at the time, remember?), asked Danny to lead him back to his hotel, then told him to park the taxi and go with him on a joyride. All with the meter running. How awesome is that?!
By 4am, Britt and I were done. Stick a fork in us, dead on our feet, done. But my aunt insisted that we'd feel better after a shower and we knew she was right. Plus, neither Britt nor I wanted to stick our dirty Yosemite feet between her clean sheets. She led us up to the bathrooms so we could take showers, and -- Oh my God, is that a jacuzzi bathtub?! WANT. Then she showed us our rooms (I'm sure each of us were glad not to have to listen to the other's snoring for a night), made sure we had enough blankets, and threw our clothes into the washing machine for us. AWESOME AUNT AWARD.
I woke up around 11:30 and decided to get some posts done. I wandered downstairs to find that my aunt had laid the coffee, measuring spoon and cup next to the coffee maker, and made myself some sweet, sweet nectar. I went and danced around on the hot - HOT! - pavement as I grabbed the computer from the car, settled down next to a very pettable kitty on the comfiest couch I have ever known with a cup of perfectly brewed coffee, and proceeded to get nothing done. Danny left to get his brakes worked on, but Aunt Debbie left work early and came home a few hours later. We chatted, laughed and exchanged stories for hours until Britt stumbled down, looking rumpled but well-rested for the first time since this trip began. She thought it was early in the morning, and found it hard to believe she'd managed to sleep until 3pm.
*** Awful, Awful Discoveries ***
My aunt left when Danny came home to run an errand, so Britt and I took the opportunity to repack the gear. We folded all our wonderfully clean laundry back into our duffel bags, then proceeded to haul every blanket, bag and bin out of a car that had turned into Hell's Fiery Furnace. Everything we touched burnt our hands. Britt's dollar store plastic dinosaur-grabby-mouth-thingy had been lying in the back window. The stick had melted in the heat and was no longer straight.
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| And it was the Triceratops, too :( |
Britt discovered the wine first. We had quite a collection of alcohol going: 10 bottles of wine from Napa Valley, about eight others from local wineries from several different states we'd traveled through so far, as well as several bottles of beer. Almost every single wine was ruined. $400+ of wine, several of them important gifts, absolutely ruined. Some of the more expensive wines, like the Angelica from V. Sattui, were sealed with red wax. The wax had bubbled and cracked, and the corks were slightly ejected. ALL OF THEM. By the way, I later tried to reseal the wax by taking a lighter to it and COULDN'T GET IT TO MELT. The ports from Heitz Cellars had wept through their corks and stained the box they were in. It could have been the changes in altitude, but we're more inclined to believe that the wine actually boiled while it sat in the car.
We dragged the whole mess inside, then sat down and stared dejectedly at each other for a while. This wasn't something either of us had considered or even heard of. I finished pulling things out of the car while Britt tried to look up what this all meant and whether anything could be done to salvage any of it. There isn't. The webpage she found said that the flavors would pale and lose vibrancy. At the time, we tried to console ourselves by saying that, since most of the wine was either for ourselves or our boyfriends, we'd only lost a few gifts. Since we'd bought some wonderful, very flavorful wine, we thought we might end up with something still half-way decent at the end. Right? Right? WRONG. This is jumping ahead a bit, but we tried one of the bottles of Angelica at the Grand Canyon. It tastes like goddamned bottom-of-the-barrel brandy, nothing at all like the sweet, smooth deliciousness we'd tried at the winery. I'm getting depressed even writing about this.
Aunt Debbie and Danny arrived as I was contemplating what to do with our small cooler. I'd forgotten a four-pack of sticks of butter had been left in there with them, and was staring at all the energy drinks swimming in an inch-deep pool. It was kinda funny, I suppose. Bottles of wine in various states of open completely covered the kitchen table that Britt sat at with a look of someone who bet their last dollar and lost, while I washed cans of Red Bull with soap and water in the sink nearby.
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| Popcorn, anyone? |
We thought about going to the strip for dinner, but it would have been expensive and neither Britt nor I were in the mood for celebration at the time, so we ordered Domino's instead and my cousins Olivia and Faith brought their families over. It was a whirl of children, simultaneous conversations with multiple people, and finding out my dad had married his first wife in Vegas.
We had to hit the road for Bryce, so we left shortly after all my cousins did, which was about 10 minutes before I realized that I failed to get pictures of any of them. Fail. But I remembered in time to harass Aunt Debbie and Danny to stand together for a photo op.
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| We love you! |
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| Just to give you nightmares. |
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