A Night in Vegas

A Crazy Tequila Infused Night in Las Vegas

My wife, Mary, and I have the same birthday even though I’m a couple years older. Last year I wanted to have a fun time in Las Vegas with her and some of our best friends. We indeed did have fun. I always love to have fun and will use any excuse to make it happen. It’s part of my Slacker Ethos.

This night started with Mary and I going to see U2 in The Sphere. It wasn’t cheap, but I have to tell you it’s totally worth the money. The experience of sitting in this thing, listening to my favorite band, and being surrounded with both visual and auditory maximum inputs really is mind blowing. We were about 1/5 down from the top and Bono was about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Didn’t matter. Because the giant curving screen with their music overwhelms the senses. I would say the best seats are about halfway up.

I did a couple crappy iPhone videos that show what it looks like, but can’t come close to showing what it feels like. I unfortunately can’t load them onto this blog because they aren’t on U-tube.

Afterwards we had to walk back because of the traffic and missing taxicabs. On the walk back, my ancient friend Jose (who inspired me to become a photographer - a story for another post) calls and says, “Dude, where are you? I’m here with your friend, Mike, and we’ve been drinking too much!”

So we hustled over to the Flamingo first floor piano bar and joined in the fun. With all the aqua bike training I do, one or two shots is all it takes for me to join the party. I had significantly more than one or two hanging out with them and their wives Jill and Ann. We laughed, we yelled, we danced - in short a great night in Vegas. At one point the dueling pianos played YMCA and told the people of the village to dance shirtless. So Mike and I were out on the floor swinging our shirts over our heads. Then the piano players said, “Ok, the villagers can put their shirts back on now!”

Somehow I ended up walking down the Vegas Strip with my pants around my ankles. Good times.

Way, way back in the day I got started doing pictures in San Francisco of my friends partying, so being at a piano bar in Las Vegas with my friends is easy work. My Fuji X100V did a really good job of mostly keeping up with the action. I think the ISO was at something crazy, like 6400 and f2.

I’ve been trying to talk them into returning for more fun. Somehow they all are shrugging it off. They’re all saying something like, “I can’t hang out with that guy in Vegas. It gets too crazy!”

Sidebar: we were in Mallorca, Spain

We were there to mostly ride bikes. You might be thinking, “Pete’s a slacker, so it was probably a couple miles a day followed with tapas and sangria.” Nope. Not even close. It was eight days of riding over 400 miles and doing over 31,000 feet of climbing. I had one single crappy sangria in the hotel we were staying in. Riding that much leads to a person being amazingly hungry and I was getting sick of eating.

The riding was followed with three days of diving around the island. We brought our dry suits. So the checked luggage was entirely dry suits and a rain jacket for me with a couple extra riding kits. The carryon was the following: helmet, riding shoes, bike seat, bathroom stuff, all my clothes for the two weeks, two riding kits, my Fuji XT5 and a couple lenses I barely had time or space to use, and a couple other things.

As a result, I haven’t been doing this or my landscape blog in a couple weeks. Will do one on the trip next time maybe.