Alright, I'll make my post about Valentine's Day and everything sometime tomorrow after my sociology test. Today I want to tell you about how we ended up in Mesquite last Saturday. The scones and cupcakes and shit above have nothing to do with this, I just didn't bring my camera on the trip.One of the last things James does before taking his driving test is get a lot of time driving on freeways. Nobody wanted to go to the congested shitty parts behind the Strip, or the weird hilly area by my house, so we decided to go toward Utah. We never planned to drive to Utah, or even past Apex, but we kept going. And going.
So we ended up in Mesquite. It's an hour out of town, so further than State Line / Primm in the other direction (I think it's further away?) but not exactly close to Utah either. It's just a little town, the muddy river runs straight through it and it's actually kinda pretty, if you're like me and you enjoy dirt and purple mountains and rivers that are more like streams, but are still FUCKING RIVERS IN THE DESERT.
I think there are only three casinos in the entire town. Virgin River, Casablanca, and the Oasis. I didn't know, but I guess the Oasis closed sometime last year.
It's probably the recession. It's hit that town hard. Everything within a certain radius of the Oasis is closed. Nothing has been demolished, it looks like some sort of Soviet town where everyone's long since moved out of the old buildings, but the buildings were never knocked down. They just sit there, abandoned. The Oasis, which is really really large compared to the Casablanca, was just... there. Like no-one had touched it in months, but it was so space-consuming and nice looking, no-one had the heart to tear it down. There was a cafe that looked like it'd been abandoned for twenty years, the roof literally falling in on itself, on a street corner across from a brand new Shell station. There were abandoned houses everywhere, and over by the lake was a golf course with brand new perfect houses lined up in row surrounding it. I wonder if the people who used to live in the abandoned houses just moved into the newer ones? What will happen to the old ones?
It was sad to see the town like that. I've never even been there before, but it's sort of scary, that something like that is happening so close to my city. What would happen if the casinos here started closing down? Hasn't everyone said that we're just a time bomb? God I don't ever want to leave here, it's so perfect as-is, what will happen to Fremont Street and everything around it? I should try to get rich quick and buy the entire area so no-one can do anything to my favorite few blocks in the world. :C
Anyway, we stopped at a tiny cafe and I got a super tasty meatball sub, we watched hockey and shit and went back home, and I wish I had brought my camera. Mesquite scared me. I feel like it's a long lost, less fortunate little sister to Vegas that I've never met. D:
When I lived on the Canadian boarder - actually, I think that's when we first bumped noses, now that I think about it - either way, I essentially lived across a massive plot of farms. They exclusively grow sunflowers up there, so in Autumn, it's really pretty because you still have seas of these bright little faces following the sun.
ReplyDeleteBut at the first hiccups of the recession, which I believe at this point to just be a series of poorly-informed decisions by the populace allowing Congress and the Representatives to be stupid and pass the consequences of said stupidity onto the figurehead-position of the Presidency-...
...I'm getting sidetracked.
Basically, a bunch of farms called it quits. Just saw the odds get overwhelming and cut their chute-straps.
So, they had fields and fields of these unharvested sunflowers in winter, with their little grey withered heads bowed and decaying.
It was really sad. Like walking into Mother Nature plugged-up at a hospice.