It's been an age since we were last in Las Vegas. I think we have passed through once or twice en route to Colorado - but the last time that we really stopped, I think, was with our friend Barry en route to Fort Union - and when was that? 2008? It certainly was before I began this blog, and that was 2009. I know it was after No Country for Old Men came out - because the Plaza Hotel featured in that, and I was expecting (wrongly) hordes of location sight-seers to be milling around. That's the hotel, on the right - not all that much changed since the 1890s, in many respects, but now run (as is the Casteñada, by the station) by the same team as restored and operate La Posada, in Winslow. Las Vegas itself seemed decidedly empty, and even more dilapidated than when I was last there - it didn't, I suspect, wear well with the pandemic.
But lunch in the Plaza Hotel was great (if shockingly indulgent. Reader, I didn't finish it all, or even come close). This is a plate of "Not Starvation Peak Nachos" - Starvation Peak being on the highway between Las Vegas and Santa Fe, and, by legend, the site where some Pueblo people chased some Spanish invaders, and held them up there until they starved to death. It's a dramatic volcanic plug - the plate of nachos was shaped rather like it, deliberately ... [And Alice had a Frito Pie. I don't think I've had a Frito Pie since Woolworths closed on Santa Fe Plaza. That dates me].
Las Vegas is one of those place where one never quite knows what one's going to find in a store window.
Also, it didn't rain on us - but we could see it coming down in torrents up to the north-west, over last year's burn - a flood warning beeped loudly on phones at some time during lunch.
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