by Nick Perez

Created on: May 10, 2008   Last Updated: November 24, 2008

Driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, as me an my family did one summer, takes you through a vast stretch of rocky desert. Along the way there are random outlet stores and signs for cities and towns hiding somewhere in the distance. As surprising as the privately owned motels that label themselves as "Casinos" and offer you shrimp cocktails and sushi on large, dirty marquees that pop up every so often about hour outside of Vegas, or the entire town not far from Sin City that claims to be the birthplace of the toilet seat, the one thing I did not expect to see on this particularly journey was rain. Long, steady downpours in fact, nonetheless. But as the city's famous slogan implies, Vegas is a place where the unusual is a frequent occurrence.

Probably the only true way to appreciate the fact that Vegas is quite literally in the middle of nowhere is to fly into the city, passing all that mountainous nothing below. But driving you get the same sense of desolation, driving through the nervously deserted landscape, wondering who decided to one day randomly plant the seeds of a large metropolis so far removed from convience and civilization. Whoever did found the city of Las Vegas, probably never imagined that it could rain hard in the desert, just as I did, which is why my family and me were so surprised when columns of dark clouds rolled into the blue sky. It started off as a little sprinkling of rain, barely requiring the use of a wiper, but as my father observed with his keen eyes and sense of location, we were about to drive right into a sheet of rain. That's just what it looked like to, the boundary between like sprinkle and heavy downpour being easily ascertainable by eyes.

It was one of the those rainstorms where even on the highest setting, the wipers offer you a view of nothing but vague shapes and colorful blurs. But that wasn't what bothered my father, the man who claimed to have driven through all types of nasty weather. What bothered him was the possibility of mudslides. If you live in an area where summer means the occasional downpour, not only are you use to it, but so to is the environment which happily soaks up rain. In the desert, the land is intentionally parched and dry. Introduce too much water, too quickly, and the land becomes unstable. But we saw nothing of the sort. In fact, we passed through the rain in about a half hour, unscathed and made good time to Vegas, all the while behind us the sky was dark and menacing.

We stayed at the MGM Grand,

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