Yep, this is San Francisco...

I’m on the 14th floor of a hotel in downtown San Francisco. And, as the earthquake safety blurb in the hotel information booklet says, if an earthquake hits, I should be just fine if I duck under this desk. I’ve already performed a couple of Test Desk Ducks, just to be sure I have plenty of room under there. So far, so good…

So we started out the day in Las Vegas this morning, although we didn’t actually stop – but we’ll be spending a couple days there on the way back. I had to wonder though, as we were driving past the sprawling span of hotels and casinos and housing developments – who was it, exactly, who thought it would be a good idea to build a city in such a desolate, bleak environment? I mean, obviously it worked out – Las Vegas is one of the fastest growing areas of the country and it attracts plenty of visitors every year. But who was the FIRST person to look out into the endless scrubby-brush-dotted desert and think, “hey, you know what would be GREAT here? A ton of casinos, some theme hotels, Wayne Newton… heck, let’s throw in Celine Dion, too, just for good measure…” It must’ve seemed like a really crazy idea at the time, but I guess sometimes the crazy ideas turn out to be the best ones.

And it’s funny how all these little touristy places have popped up in the middle of the Mojave desert. There was some silly “Greek” fast food/souvenir shop out in the middle of nowhere (and a Starbucks, too – we couldn’t find a Starbucks out in west Texas, but in the middle of the Mojave? Sure! No problem!), which I’m sure had absolutely nothing to do with Greece (unless they’ve started opening chains of Dairy Queens and selling shot glasses and magnets all over the country…). And it got me thinking about some of those road trips we used to take when I was a kid. I started remembering how my mom always wanted to stop for lunch at this chain of Pennsylvania Dutch restaurants. Something like the Holland Cupboard or the Dutch Kitchen – no, wait – it was the Dutch Pantry. I don’t even think they served anything remotely Dutch or Pennsylvania Dutch – it was mostly just grilled cheese sandwiches and hamburgers. But my mom didn’t want to go for the entrees – she went for the dessert. Some kind of pie… moo shoo horsefly pie, or horseshoe pie, or tie-your-own-fly pie, or something like that. Shoo fly pie? Was that it? Anyway, it seems like every road trip we took began with a stop at the Dutch Pantry. It was the kind of place you only visited IF you happened to be on vacation. And certainly not the place to educate yourself about the Pennsylvania Dutch culture…

But this week I won’t be worrying about the Greeks or the Pennsylvania Dutch… I’ll be worrying about finding myself some really good chocolate. And I might be worrying about needing to duck under this desk, but I’ll try not to. :)






This picture is for Faisal -- you probably need a vacation anyway, so I think you should plan to be in Vegas on July 29th. :)