When I think about my history with Las Vegas, I don’t consider my time wild and indulgent in the “what happens in Vegas…” Hunter S. Thompson sense. However, I realize that every time I’ve gone, I’m not who I am at home.

The first time I visited was in the year 2000 when I was still married. My husband had (maybe still has?) a weird strain of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), and some of the ways it manifested was he was convinced we couldn’t drive with luggage in the trunk or it would permanently throw off the car’s wheel alignment, and that playing a car stereo for more than an hour burned out the speakers. The rules applied to the car we owned (a Saturn, which, admittedly, was annoyingly low to the ground) but also rentals. Especially rentals, because in his reality, dealers would come after us for perpetuity like the “I want my two dollars!” kid in Better Off Dead following some auditory or dragging tire violation (or both).

I was working full time as a photo librarian for Time & Life (alav hashalom) and didn’t have the bandwidth to plan our late (and final) summer vacation, but he was in a window between film projects. I remember vaguely suggesting, “I dunno. Let’s check out the Southwest, see some American desert” and next thing I knew he’d planned a road trip from Vegas to Santa Fe to the Grand Canyon and back to Vegas again.