Adventures in Rear-Wheel Drive Land

Well, here I am at last. After all the packing and driving (giant hat tip to Marathon Man for heaving the truck up and over the Vail pass) and tearful good-byes, after all the teensy cuts on my hands and fingers from boxes and scissors, after all the fast food and nervous searches for rural Utah gas stations, here I am. And I've even managed to find the time to turn twenty dollars into forty dollars with a cunning mixture of roulette and Hexbreaker. Life in Las Vegas is very fine indeed.

Our local casino -- a fine establishment called Suncoast -- has Fifty-Cent Roulette, which means that twenty bucks goes longer than Ice Man's johnson. A master of the conservative betting style, I used the Schaffer System to play the colors, and swiftly turned twenty dollars into thirty. Then, The Madame and I tracked down one of only two Hexbreaker slot machines in the casino, and rocked it two-cent style, turning our new ten dollars from roulette into twenty via a series of outstanding bonuses. Then, we cashed out and came home. Sweet, sweet Hexbreaker. I found myself fantasizing about a time when Nip-Nip, Marathon Man, and Muffin will come here to cinSity, and we can take over a fifty-cent table... and then we will play until the sun comes up, all the while doubling our money every twenty minutes. Glorious.

But that's not what I came here to discuss with you. What I came here to discuss is the preponderance of outrageously en fuego cars that you see just driving around town. Here's list of what I've seen so far; keep in mind that I've only lived here for seven days and that none of these cars were sighted anywhere near The Strip. Ready? Here you go: two Ferrari 360 Spiders (one yellow, one silver); two Lotus Esprit V8s (both yellow); two Rolls Royce Phantoms (one silver, one white); one Bentley GT (silver... not terribly inspiring); and, the absolute king of what I've seen to date, a pearl yellow Lamborghini Gallardo. Marathon Man, before he left, asked me how long he thought it would take for me to get jaded about this kind of rolling wealth, before I only showed interest in truly obscure automobiles. I'm wondering that too. It turns out that if you live somewhere with no winter and no rain, it doesn't really matter to you if your car is unable to handle the weather. What you care about is whether your car can handle the turns in the Virgin River Gorge at high speed.

So. The real question here is this: can the Lancer and the MINI hug the road as it snakes through the canyon shaped by the Virgin River at top speed beyond the watchful eyes of both the Utah and the Nevada Highway Patrols? That remains to be seen.