The Wickedest Town in the West

Short Version:
We see some sights on the (long!) way to Las Vegas

Long Version:
Having found a better Sedona, with loads of awesome riding still to do and a bunch of interesting people, we didn't want to leave. Unfortunately we'd booked ourselves some Vegas action back when we weren't quite so enamoured of the place, so after a delicious farewell breakfast in Darch's uber-luxury RV we hit the road, north and east towards Nevada.

We didn't get very far; the first town we reached - it was called Cottonwood - soaked up a bunch of our time with its thrift stores and chore-enabling facilities. Some loud subnorms had an argument over a television at the local Goodwill store, and we met a man shopping on behalf of his broken-backed wife (she'd been pulled downwards and sideways by a rather strong patient in the hospital where she works as a nurse).

In the mountains to the west of Cottonwood we found ourselves wending our way up, and up, and then into and around the narrow streets of a little town called Jerome, once heralded as "the wickedest town in the West." Jerome was a mining town, contributing heavily during the back half of the 19th and front of the 20th centuries to Arizona's status as Amerika's leading copper producer. The town burnt down repeatedly during the late 1890's, and blasting (the intentional kind) in the mines at one point shook the town so hard that the local jail slid down the hillside. They had a bunch of mining disasters, including innumerable fires throughout the mines; one of them stayed alight for over twenty years. Nowadays it's a tourist-focussed town, with souvenir shops and art galleries galore, and a bunch of ghost-related stuff. And a wine-tasting cellar for the vineyard owned by Maynard James Keenan, lead singer of prog-rock band Tool.

We carried on, over the hills and far away. Far, far away. You'd think by now that we'd be used to the huge distances between things here in Amerika, but we're still being surprised at how long it takes to get from one place to another. In this instance, it was dusk when we started down into the Las Vegas basin, giving us seriously excellent views of the city lighting up for the night as the sun set behind the Spring Mountains to the west. The skyward beam from the tip of the black pyramid that is the Luxor was a great navigational beacon, and we made it to the nearby, mildly fancypants New York, New York hotel relatively unscathed by the chaos of the city's rush hour.

We ensconced the Reaper in the parking lot amid a wild assortment of luxury sports cars, then set off into the labyrinthine hotel/casino complex in search of the hotel registration desk. Which we found, but not before we saw an incredible assortment of people, and started to figure a few things out about Vegas:
- You can smoke wherever you like. Please do.
- There is no dress code.
- Fat is good.