I’m back from my trip. Barely managed any writing. Did work a little on fleshing out my plot outline but it really wasn’t much in the grand scheme of things. On the way home, I did scrawl a bit, unrelated to my book, about the feelings of frustration and sadness I had at the end of my trip (being unrewarded/slapped in the face for hard hard work really sucks) and my anger at being stuck on the tarmac for two hours before my five hour flight, and worst of all, about being stuck in a seat next to the largest, fattest man on the plane who took up a good chunk of my seat as well. I was exhausted and desperate for sleep but I couldn’t find any position in my seat where his pasty, fleshy hams of arms weren’t touching me in some way. So at one point I huddled over my tray, letting my long hair down to hang as a shielding curtain and I cut loose on the page. It is mostly a bunch of drivel but I felt a little better.

The whole of the trip though, was good. My team was highly successful in accomplishing what seemed three weeks ago to be the impossible. I had kudos from people I had never met before. I even had a random older woman walk by me in my endless corridor toward my room telling me that I looked beautiful. I met wonderful people and spent time with coworkers that I only get to talk to over the phone. Until the last 24 hours, everything was awesome.

One of the things that I love most about Vegas is that you get all sorts of people going to that city. The rich, the wanting-to-get-rich, the classy, the trashy, plastic Barbie doll types, families, foreigners, thugs (someone was shot in the parking lot at Caesars while we were there), the young, the old, single, married or having an affair, teetotalers, boozehounds, the beautiful, the ugly and the just plain strange. Everywhere you turn there is a story, a character, a situation.

Case in point. On the second evening that we were there, I ended up in a group that managed to get into one of the most exclusive lounges in all of Vegas–the members-only House of Blues Foundation Room (individual memberships start at $3500). While we were standing downstairs waiting to get up to the top, an elderly couple managed to mush their way in front of us. They were at least in their 60s if not 70s, both shorter than me (I’m 5′4″) and dressed as though they were going ballroom dancing. He wore a navy suit and thick nearly circular black plastic framed glasses and a rather sedate version of Andy Warhol hair. The wife was bitching at the old man, “They won’t let us up without tipping them–give me five dollars, give me five dollars!” I don’t think the five dollars that the man gave her did the trick as we never saw her again. We later found out that the doormen would let you up for $200 or if you promised to go see one of his ‘girls’ upstairs. The old guy slipped into the elevator with our group, leaving his wife behind. All night we watched him wandering through the club, hitting on the young ladies. At one point we almost literally had to pry one of our friends out of his clutches but that didn’t deter him. He just went to the next woman he saw and started over. Most people in the club didn’t see the exchange with his wife so probably only thought him as a bit of a lecherous old man, not as someone who escaped his harpy of a wife for a matter of hours. I wonder how things went down when he finally went back to his hotel room.

The view from the top of Mandalay Bay, however, was breathtaking.