Missing Las Vegas

 


Missing Las Vegas

 

 

When I was fifteen years old, we embarked on what was supposed to be a dreamy vacation in our trusty travel trailer, a mobile home on wheels that often felt more like a tumbleweed than a caravan. With a tent as our backup bedroom, my dad and I would occasionally rough it outside, while my mom luxuriated in the trailer's "spacious" interiors. Our grand destination was Jasper National Park, but the journey there was filled with more drama than a soap opera marathon.

My mother, you see, had a slight obsession with gambling. And by slight, I mean she was practically the queen of slot machines, with a crown made of poker chips. Her love for Las Vegas was legendary in our family, akin to a pirate's thirst for treasure. So, you can imagine her excitement as we approached the glittering oasis in the desert. Unfortunately for her, the desert had other plans.

After a scorching day of driving, we had to periodically stop to cool down our car, which seemed to prefer being a sauna on wheels. My mom, exhausted from the heat and dreaming of neon lights and jackpot bells, dozed off in the passenger seat. My dad, in a moment of what he would later call "strategic brilliance," decided to slip past Las Vegas quietly. Very quietly. As in, stealthier than a ninja on tiptoe.

An hour or two later, past Las Vegas and inching closer to the Utah border, Mother Nature decided to stage a production of "Thunderstorm: The Musical." Like all good desert storms, it burst onto the scene with no warning and plenty of drama. My mom woke up mid-jeer, her face a mix of confusion and impending doom. The highway turned into a river, and our trailer, a raft in the gale, rocked violently as if it had been cast in a low-budget disaster film.

My mom’s response to this natural phenomenon? Screaming. Lots of screaming. My dad, the ever-steady captain of our leaky ship, pulled over to wait it out, all the while muttering something about the wrath of a woman scorned by skipped casinos. When the storm finally decided to take a bow and exit stage left, we resumed our crawl to the nearest safe haven, a relic of a motel that looked like it had hosted more ghosts than guests.

This motel, a time capsule from the 1940s, greeted us with a broken window that faced the highway, a perfect metaphor for the state of our journey. Inside, the room seemed to teeter on the brink of collapse, much like our vacation spirits. The storm having abruptly ceased, my mom's thoughts returned to her missed gambling fix. She turned to my dad and asked, with a hint of hopeful delusion, how much further to Las Vegas. When he revealed that we were nearly at the Utah border, her reaction was akin to a volcanic eruption.

In a fury, she stormed out of the room and made a beeline for the motel’s adjoining café, which, in a twist of fate, featured a casino; that if, you can call maybe twenty slot machines a casino. She spent the evening cursing our unfortunate location and lamenting her misfortune in this "rip-off joint." My dad and I could hear her muttering about the absence of real card games and how she would've struck it rich if only we had stopped in Vegas. Ah, the sweet symphony of family vacations.

As she returned, defeated by the one-armed bandits, she announced with the solemnity of a fallen hero that she had lost a considerable sum. She was certain that the gambling gods were punishing her for not being in Las Vegas, the promised land of fortunes. My dad and I exchanged knowing glances, silently vowing that our next trip would be somewhere devoid of both thunderstorms and slot machines.

In the end, while we did make it to Jasper National Park, the memories of our chaotic, casino-less desert adventure remained the highlight of that trip. If there's one thing I learned, it's that family vacations are less about the destination and more about the journey, complete with all its unexpected detours, dramatic thunderstorms, and unplanned gambling escapades

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