Las Vegas, Minden, Seattle, Fargo trip report

Here’s my report from a week of copiloting a friend’s fancy airplane.

First overnight stop was Las Vegas, which meant that we got to see the Grand Canyon, a spectacular sight even from 30,000′. One of the few dog-friendly hotels that I could find was the Loews resort in Lake Las Vegas, an artificial lake whose water is sucked out of adjacent Lake Mead and then pumped back in. It is pretty far from the Strip and was intended to be a self-contained dreamland of irrigated golf courses, Italianate condo complexes, and luxury hotels. They went bankrupt in 2008, sticking creditors (i.e., probably the U.S. taxpayer) with $1 billion in debt that would never be repaid. The casino and former Ritz Carlton hotel are both shut down. There are major gaps around the lake where the land was bulldozed in preparation for condo development, but no buildings were ever constructed. The condos that were built are about 5 percent occupied, based on my survey of evening lights in windows. Condo fees are $1 per month per square foot, or about $1000 per month on a two-bedroom apartment. They’ll have to go much higher unless a lot more people move in, since effectively the owner of one condo will have to pay for maintenance on about 20,000 square feet of space.

I took Ollie (four month old Border Collie) for a walk on the bluffs that formerly looked over Lake Mead. The lake is about half empty due to a combination of drought and the Southwest’s thirst for Colorado River water. It is expected to dry up completely in the next 10-20 years. A family of coyotes was living on what had been a boat ramp. Perhaps they are waiting for the humans to abandon Lake Mead and Lake Las Vegas and they’ll move into the condos. In a fit of optimism back in the 1950s and 1960s, the government built Glen Canyon Dam, upstream from Lake Mead but on the same river. The chance of there ever being enough water to fill both reservoirs is minute (the dams were built and water allocated based on data taken from the wettest century in 1000 or so years (source)).

Ollie enjoyed a trip to his first dog park in Henderson, Nevada. This is a fantastically efficient use of tax dollars in my opinion, creating a gathering place for taxpayers to enjoy each others’ company. Instead of a $14 billion tunnel to nowhere, the city built a few fences, put in some rugged agility equipment, and provided some shade and freshwater. I hadn’t been there too long before 30 police cars arrived to the development across the street and then four armored cars with “SWAT” painted on the side. The woman next to me said “Everyone in Las Vegas is first generation money. These people came from trailer parks. The wife got a job in a casino and the husband in construction. They had two kids, bought three cars, two jetskis, two ATVs, and kept taking out mortgages to pay for it all. When the economy headed south they just couldn’t handle being poor.” The incident barely made the news when I checked. A guy upset about his divorce was holed up in a house threatening to kill himself. He ultimate set the house on fire and ran out, but was apprehended.

We proceeded on to Minden, Nevada, just east of Lake Tahoe, where the soaring is some of the best in the U.S. We took a few glider lessons at Soar Minden, but unfortunately there wasn’t much lift. We left Ollie with the gals behind the desk at the Holiday Inn and went out for Basque food at JT’s. Minden and Gardnerville are home to at least three Basque restaurants due to an original community of Basque sheep herders who moved there when the West was settled (invaded?) by Europeans.

Seattle was mostly devoted to keeping Ollie entertained and killing off his intestinal parasites. I stayed at the University Inn, a simple hotel next to the University of Washington. The U has a literally awesome campus, with massive concrete buildings that tower above pedestrians. They have a tiled “Red Square” that is big enough to land a spaceship. I’ve already covered the scene at the dog park and at Norm’s, a dog-friendly restaurant, so I’ll limit myself to writing about the university neighborhood. Aside from a few sandwich shops, the restaurants around the university seemed all to be Asian or Middle Eastern. A lot of students were themselves Asian or Middle Eastern (complete with Islamic headgear for the women), but not nearly as high a percentage as you’d think from seeing all of the Teriyaki, Korean, and Falafel restaurants. Unlike Harvard and MIT students, most of the UW undergraduates had little or no interest in a puppy. What they were interested in was a visit by Barack Obama (story), which shut down much of the city and all of the airports for nearly 24 hours (a “revenue holiday” for area flight schools, charter operators, and other aviation businesses; we’re getting one here in New England on Monday (see this temporary flight restriction); our last Obama-imposed day off was a week ago when he came to Boston for a Democratic Party fundraiser (story)). I thought it was odd that students would be so enthusiastic about a politician who is spending all of their future income on gold-plated public works projects, unsuccessful wars, and expensive health care and pensions for older Americans. Then I reflected on the fact that if this generation isn’t well educated enough to get a job after graduation perhaps they recognize that they aren’t well educated enough to spend their own money; they need a wise government to spend it for them.

My one cultural excursion in Seattle was attending an outdoor rehearsal of Titanium Sporkestra, a tattooed marching band (video) undeterred by the cool evening air down by the waterfront. Ollie turns out not to be a huge fan of the bass drum.

After Obama had departed we were able to get access to our airplane at Boeing Field, fuel up, and depart. Air Force One was gone, but we taxied past Air Force cargo planes that had been ferried down from Alaska to carry SUVs for Obama and his entourage. We enjoyed a beautiful flight over the Cascades and Montana Rockies with the setting sun behind us, then landed around 9 pm in Fargo, North Dakota. The Holiday Inn there was hopping with a Shriner’s convention. In the morning we departed for Hanscom Field and arrived to find the wind at 20 knots gusting up to 27 knots, the most challenging conditions of the entire trip. My friend handled the landing beautifully, carrying a bit of extra airspeed and pulling back the power a little slower than usual. The touchdown was smooth and we hardly used any runway. Ollie ran from the airplane into the East Coast Aero Club maintenance hangar to see his friends, whining with delight at the sight of Claire.