The Original Sim City

After Death Valley, we drove two hours to Las Vegas, stopping first at the Red Rock National Conservation Area west of the city. Admission is $20 per carload, with reservations for timed entry now “required” October through May. (The quotation marks are because we got in without a reservation, but then it was a rainy weekday in mid-November.) The scenery is stunning; you can drive the loop and gawk, or get out at one of the many parking lots and hike. You might even come upon a wedding.

While Las Vegas is undeniably fascinating from a sociological perspective, the American id laid bare, I can’t seem to get into its groove. At best, I find it’s a simulacrum of an actual city, and at worst it’s a vision of the dystopian, corpocratic future. (Next stop: Wall-E.) During our visit, the Strip was lined with chain-link fences for a Formula One race, and one couldn’t help but think of bread and circuses.

But my husband, Adam, and I had reason to be in the area—more on that later—and his mom, Barbara, was game. We chose the Waldorf Astoria Las Vegas because it has no casino and doesn’t allow smoking. It’s a glitzed-up Hilton with high-gloss wood, frosted glass, and Aesop amenities. Like so many famous brands in Las Vegas, it’s an ersatz version of the original.

Barbara’s room was a normal rectangle, but ours was triangular, with a long wall of windows extending through the bathroom, including the water closet. If the ads for the iPhone 17 Pro Max’s zoom lens are accurate, we gave the folks at Marriott’s Grand Chateau quite a show.

Our view was dominated by a giant billboard that often promoted a personal injury lawyer—as 99% of billboards across the land seem to do. The entire city should come with a warning about flashing lights for photosensitive viewers.

Barbara was on board with the trip because she craves a thrill—in recent years, she has gone ziplining, hang-gliding, and indoor skydiving. (This would be impressive at my age, let alone hers.) I googled “fun Vegas activities for teens,” removed anything I refused to do, and let her choose. At the top of her list were the thrill rides, so we went to The Big Apple Coaster at New York-New York Hotel & Casino first thing. You should’ve seen the look on the ticket agent’s face when I asked about senior admission. It was a hell of a ride, jerky and wild, and we emerged punch-drunk and giddy.

Barbara was even more excited about Big Shot at the Strat, which “catapults 16 riders from the 921-foot high platform up the Tower’s mast to a height of 1,081 feet and down again [and then] shot back up again.” Unfortunately, a thunderstorm got in the way. Maybe next trip.

Less thrilling, but still an adventure, was the SlotZilla zipline at the Fremont Street Experience. None of us were dying to zipline again, but the prospect of doing it “superhero-style”—i.e., prone—held an appeal. (Barbara forgot to stretch out her arms.) The bigger laugh was waving at people and calling out to them, but nothing more than that.

She preferred the fake flying of Flyover: a row of seats gets extended into a semispherical theater, where you’re made to feel like you’re soaring over somewhere beautiful. The three of us watched the Iceland show, and then Barbara went back for a reprise, as well as one about the American West. The “flying” part is fun, although I could do without being misted in the face and the hokey introductory “film” that pads out the experience.

The Paradox Museum is Instagram bait, full of mirror tricks and optical illusions. We enjoyed it just the same, particularly because we arrived soon after it opened and no one else was there.

It was Barbara’s idea to mimic a fistfight in the shadow-capture room.

It had also been Barbara’s idea to travel somewhere warm and dry, but we had rain every day of the trip. At one point, a downpour marooned us inside the Park MGM, where we ate lunch at Eataly (more of a food hall than a store) and killed time at an exhibit of Lady Gaga’s outfits. The weird teeth were in a vitrine—at the Lady Gaga thing, not Eataly—with no explanation.

Tourism is down in Vegas, but it still felt like too many people to me. One exception was Cirque du Soleil’s Kà, which was maybe 25% full. The show is 20 years old, and other attractions have surely stolen the spotlight. None of us had been to a Cirque du Soleil show in many years, and while the “plot” is hooey, the stagecraft is magic—a giant platform moves around and even tilts 90 degrees. And the acrobatics and aerialists are astounding.

The main attraction these days is The Sphere. No concert was scheduled while we were in town, but we wanted to see the building, so we bought tickets to the Wizard of Oz experience. The structure is indeed a marvel, if better from a distance; up close, you see the individual lights, like pixels on a computer screen. And the lobby is handsome, at least until they plaster ads everywhere. To avoid getting stuck with single seats it can’t sell, the venue relegates odd-numbered groups like ours to the less desirable sections higher up. We actually thought we might have had a better view as a result, but it did require more navigation of the crowd-control measures, including staffers yelling instructions in that TSA-style tone that makes you tune out.

The transition from trompe l’loeil art deco interior to immersive cinema is impressive—kind of like a positive jump scare—but the film has not been improved by being blown way up and bedazzled with special effects, both CGI and IRL. And the moral really is suspect. Go back to your sepia-toned, dust-bowl life, girl! Forget all about the Technicolor wonderland where you’re revered as a queen!

The pedestrian bridge to the Venetian was closed because of the Formula One race, forcing us to shuffle 40 minutes outside in the rain. As elsewhere in Vegas, I wished Temple Grandin would come in and “humanize” the process of getting around. And then the night turned comical as we wandered around the Venetian searching for Bouchon restaurant. You have to hand it to whoever came up with the idea of a mall with a canal in the middle—it really is something. Adam and I have been to Bouchon a few times before, and we like how it feels more civilized than most restaurants in Vegas. Plus, I had a near-medical need for a Vesper and some fries.

We also had a pleasant lunch at Din Tai Fung at Aria, although aside from the noodles with sesame sauce, the vegetarian options pale in comparison to the meat and seafood versions.

Our best meal was at Crossroads at Resorts World Las Vegas. Like just about everything on the Strip, it’s an outpost of something that started elsewhere—in this case, L.A. It’s 100% vegan, and everything was terrific. I would return in a heartbeat for the butter beans with roasted tomatoes and the lion’s mane mushroom “steak.”

Aside from meals and thrills, my favorite moments were in the morning, when I ventured out for a decent coffee. The quiet is a relief. But you can’t trust Google Maps for walking directions—Vegas confounds it. The screenshot below illustrates what I mean: there’s no need to cross the Strip to get to District Donuts in the Cosmopolitan (which does have good coffee—thanks, Reddit).

I stopped each morning to marvel at a shopping mall’s remarkably sad logo and a Claes Oldenburg/Coosje Van Bruggen sculpture that’s likely to get more abstract as the years go by. Could anyone under 50 even explain what it is?

The raison d’être for this whole trip, or at least how it got started, was that I’ve wanted to visit Michael Heizer’s mammoth land art installation, “City,” since reading about it in the New York Times a few years ago.

Nearly everything about Michael Heizer’s land art megasculpture called “City” can seem hard to fathom. That it’s a mile and a half long and nearly half a mile wide, smack in the middle of a remote stretch of the high Nevada desert, where what passes for a neighbor is Area 51. […] That it cost $40 million to build. Even that it’s called “City.” It’s a city in name only. Exquisitely groomed dirt mounds, roads, buttes and depressions like dry lake beds spread out in no immediately obvious order and in different directions. At both ends of the site, monumental structures riff on ancient ruins. Now, half a century after Heizer stuck his first shovel in the ground, “City” is finally opening to visitors, which may be the most unbelievable thing of all. It had become the art-world version of ancient Atlantis, a chimera.

I tried for tickets each year, and finally succeeded, choosing the last day of its May-November season (my birthday, so I knew Adam wouldn’t be able to get out of it). While Barbara headed home, we drove 90 minutes to the town of Alamo, Nevada, where we met up with our entertaining driver, Mark, and four other visitors. Then it was another 90-minute drive to the site.

Can anything live up to all the hype and effort? The project is striking, especially when you climb up and look down on it, and the surrounding scenery (below) is gorgeous.

Three hours at the site, however, was far too long: I started to think about the immense amount of ego involved, how we felt trapped in a sequel to Gus Van Sant’s Gerry, and how the art is not necessarily an improvement over the natural land it displaced. As at Walter De Maria’s “Lightning Field,” a similar/superior experience in New Mexico, the escapade becomes about something else. Photography is verboten (unless you’re Annie Leibovitz, who shot Timothée Chalamet there for Vogue), but I kept pondering what I would photograph if I could, and how I look at a place—any place—differently when I’m wondering how to capture it. The act of photography is about framing and savoring specific moments, whereas visitors to “City” are stuck in an interminable, wide-angle panorama. The irony is that the place photographs better than it looks in real life. On the way back to Alamo, as our group chatted about how neat it would be to see a concert at “City,” one of our companions joked, “Yeah, it could be called Gray Rocks.”

That sounds like I hated it, and I didn’t. Wandering in the high desert for so long had a surreal charm. The day was utterly memorable, which is all I ever want for my birthday. Just don’t ask me what I did last year.

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Previous travel coverage:
••• That’s Life in Death Valley
••• The Glorious Isolation of Santa Barbara Island
••• Hiking From Hotel to Hotel in the Dolomites
••• A Ramble Through the English Countryside
••• Notes from Up North: Healdsburg, Mendocino, and San Francisco 
••• There’s More to Peru Than Machu Picchu
••• On a Backroads Tour of New Zealand’s South Island
••• Navigating the North Island of New Zealand
••• Don’t Be So Quick to Write Off Phoenix
••• The Most Magical City in the World
••• One and Done in Sedona
••• A Proper Visit to Santa Monica
••• A Quickie in San Francisco
↓↓↓ Dipping a Toe Into Southern Corsica
••• The Exquisite Luxury of Taking Paris for Granted
••• Santa Rosa Island in One Day
••• Soaking Up History at Castle Hot Springs
••• Driving Through the Heart of Hokkaido
••• Tokyo Is a World Unto Itself
••• Paso Robles, Pinnacles National Park, and Beyond
••• A Review of the Inn at Mattei’s Tavern
••• Another Quickie in L.A.
••• Sitting Pretty at the One & Only Mandarina
••• The Mysteries of Istanbul
••• Palm Springs: Midweek at the Oasis
••• Exploring the Sea Caves of Santa Cruz Island
••• A Summer Swing Through the Northeast
••• Why Is Everyone Going to Portugal?
••• Patagonia Made Easy
••• A Quickie in L.A.
••• From Penthouse to Pavement in Mexico City
••• Do Greek Islands Live Up to the Fantasy?
••• Splendid Isolation at Utah’s Lodge at Blue Sky
••• Three Reasons to Visit Paso Robles Now

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