Las Vegas is a place I wanted to see. Why? Good question! I have little or no interest in gambling, i don’t like slot machines and I don’t understand dice games. But Las Vegas is an image. A fictional image, certainly. A playground. A expensively designed display of lights and razzmatazz, sprinkled onto the Nevada desert. But, through television and cinema, it has flashed a thousand times into my experience and subliminally raised my curiosity. I wanted to see it.

So we set off west from Winslow, along route 66. This brought us, as Joyce would say, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, (in other words, back and forth, up and down, over and under, along narrow and steep, windy mountain roads), to the town of Oatman. If there is a town in America that is the absolute, diametric opposite to Las Vegas, it is Oatman, Arizona. The entire town would fit in one Vegas hotel lobby. There is no neon. There are no fancy (or even plain), street lights. Wild donkeys walk in the street. Wooden buildings are fronted with old wooden walkways, presumably to keep pedestrians from walking in the mud and the blood and the beer. If there was any mud. If they ever get rain here again. And if there was any blood. The gunfights are long gone, though a couple of cowboys stood around outside the Oatman Hotel and occasionally did reenactments.

We, being fearless, hungry and dry, stepped into the hotel in search of beer and victuals. We found a table, (don’t sit with your back to the door – I learned that from the old Wild Bill Hickok stories), and ate and drank heartily. Every inch of the counter, walls and bannisters, were covered in dollar bills. Real ones. Someone said that there was up to a hundred thousand dollars stuck to those walls. The owner probably keeps a loaded shotgun behind the bar. In the corner, an old cowboy with a guitar, sat and sang through the afternoon. Songs about lost love and the history of his hat and other great legends of the west. We chatted with him for a while before we left. No shots were fired.

There is no mining in Oatman anymore, though the old pit entrance is still there. It’s mostly occupied by artists and shops and stalls for fancy goods and souvenirs.

We saddled up, (i.e. got back in the car), and headed outta town. We rode off, (drove), into the sunset. Still heading for Las Vegas.