Arriving Resistant

My first evening in Las Vegas, I drove the wrong direction.

Not by accident. The Strip was behind me. I took back roads out of the city looking for rocky terrain and whatever the desert looked like without being over-developed. The heat was different from anything in my recent travels. Not the thick wet weight of Texas or Florida but something drier, more direct. One hundred degrees that came at you differently. By the time I reached Hoover Dam the light was going flat and the crowd had thinned enough that I could actually take in the scenery instead of navigating between fellow onlookers.

I stood there looking at the dam and thought about what it is. An engineering solution to a real problem. Water management. Power generation. Something built to do necessary work. Then I turned around and drove back toward a city built to do something else entirely. Both monumental. Both foreign to the ground they occupy. Completely different purposes at their core.

That contrast was what I needed. A compass reset before I was ready to take on my week. Not an escape from the assignment, but a starting point.

I had been dreading this assignment.

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I do not have strong opinions about gambling. The smoke that migrates out of designated areas and into corridors bothers me, morally as well as physically if I am being honest. The spectacle of it all, the volume and the light and the design intent to keep you from knowing what time it is, none of it is where I naturally land when I am trying to function in a city for a week.

The people I know who love Las Vegas as an escape are not wrong. They are right about their own experience. I have colleagues with comparable travel histories who land in this city with genuine enthusiasm.

Instead I let a layover reinforce what I already believed.

A couple of weeks before this assignment started, I connected through Las Vegas on a flight from Los Angeles to St. Louis. I walked through an airport full of people staring at slot machines, past a smoking area that was not containing what it was supposed to contain, past advertising that leaned into every assumption I already held. I filed it away. An airport is not a city. It is either the city's best ambassador or its worst one, and Las Vegas's airport knows exactly who it is talking to. It leaned into that market without apology. It just was just not me.

I have walked the concourses at Atlanta hundreds of times specifically because the walk reveals something the Plane Train does not. Atlanta is both a destination and one of the world's busiest connecting hubs. It has to serve travelers who are not going to Atlanta at all, and the art and the long corridors exist partly to give those passengers something that reduces the stress of being in between. Las Vegas's airport is not in between anything. Everyone there is arriving. The design knows this and leans into it — everything pushes you forward, toward the door, toward the city, toward whatever you came to start. That is not a design failure. It is a different assignment executed well. I walked through it for forty minutes and treated it as evidence.

I mentioned to more than one colleague that I was not looking forward to this rotation. Most agreed, which felt like confirmation. But a few pushed back, not defensively, just with genuine disagreement. They had been to Las Vegas and found something worth returning to. Not tourists. People with the same frequency of travel, the same capacity to read a city, the same reasons to be skeptical of spectacle. And they landed differently.

That gap does not resolve if the city is simply bad. It only resolves if I am wrong about the city. I should have pushed on that sooner. When I finally did, what I found underneath my position was not much. Some real observations. An airport layover I had treated as an answer. And colleagues who agreed with me, which felt like confirmation but was probably just the same assumptions traveling in a group.

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Early in my traveling career, first year or so, I was on assignment in Cincinnati. I remember wanting to track down the local favorites, not because I was writing anything down but because I wanted to have an honest opinion worth giving someone. I found Skyline Chili and Gold Star. Did not love either. Found a Mellow Mushroom north of the city that felt like a piece of Atlanta transported to Ohio, which was its own kind of comfort when you are homesick and $37 a day deep into a long rotation. And I stumbled onto a burger place called Terry's Turf Club by asking around. Locals hangout, good find, the kind of place that fills up because it earns it.

The per diem made the search feel real. Every meal decision mattered. I was not optimizing. I was curious about what a city actually had, and there was genuine satisfaction in the tracking down.

I am not sure that version of the search still operates the same way. Houston is on autopilot. I have a list of places I trust and I return to them without much deliberation. That is useful. But somewhere in building it, the hunt changed character. It became more about confirmation than discovery. Houston and Cincinnati are different cities but they were both new once, and what I brought to Cincinnati in year one, that willingness to dig for something without knowing what I would find, I am not certain I bring to every new city the same way now. Las Vegas exposed that. There is no list here yet. No autopilot. Just the work of beginning again. All the easy cities started here.

Las Vegas does not offer me obvious entry points. No familiar food category I am drawn to, no neighborhood that maps onto my usual approach, no pattern I have already established. That absence requires more conscious effort than a city where things run automatically. It is not that the city is harder. It is that I have to make more decisions that I would normally not have to make. For a few weeks before this trip I let that anticipated effort become a verdict on the destination rather than a description of the work ahead.

When a rotation city is difficult, the people I travel with tend to cope in one of two ways. Some retreat. The hotel room becomes a controlled environment and they stock it accordingly. Food comes to the door. The city stays outside. It is a reasonable way to survive a difficult assignment. I cope the other way. I push outward. Wanderlust comes naturally to me and travel anxiety largely does not, which means the controlled perimeter has never felt like safety. it has always felt like a missed opportunity. Neither approach is wrong. They just produce different things. Right now I am in a city where nothing runs automatically yet, and that means the approach has not had a chance to prove itself."

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Rural Pennsylvania. A few years into traveling full time, on assignment in a small market where the options were thin enough that I knew I was going to have to work for anything worth finding. I had built the habit by then of asking the staff. Not as a formal process, just part of settling in. Where do you go when you want something actually worth eating? Not the chain on the highway. The place you would send a friend.

Chicken wings and a beer had been a serious pursuit for a good portion of my twenties. The recommendation that came back was a hotel bar with happy hour wings. That put it squarely in my wheelhouse, but I had a high bar. I had made my own wings. I had tracked down the Anchor Bar in Buffalo because I wanted to know the original. I went anyway.

The McKeansburg Hotel was a bar more than a restaurant. The kind of room where the regulars know each other and a stranger at the bar is noticed but not unwelcome. The wings arrived as the full wing, not the sanitized drums-and-flats that restaurants serve because they are easier to eat without making a mess, but the whole thing. Unmanageable. Sloppy. Exactly right.

I went back every week for the rest of that assignment. I became a temporary regular.

That is what the system produces when it works. Not just a good meal but a room where you can belong for an hour. The McKeansburg Hotel did not just feed me. It gave me somewhere to land in a market that did not have much else going for it. That distinction matters more over a long rotation than it does on any given night.

The system has not come back empty often enough that I have stopped trusting it. That is not optimism about Las Vegas specifically. It is just enough times that I can get on the plane. Houston is autopilot because I did the work of building it. Every city on that list was new once.

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I was up at 3:30 on my last morning of the first week. Pacific time. My body was not interested in adjusting. It was 6:30 inside and that is when I get up. The Strip was going to be quiet in a way it would not be at any reasonable hour, so I went.

The neon signs and LED billboards were still running. The city was still performing. It just was not performing for much of an audience. The people still out from the night before were winding down rather than ramping up, which changed the whole feel of the street. Without the density the whole thing felt like a different place. Not smaller exactly, just less urgent. It was the first time I moved through it without the feeling that the whole thing was calibrated to get something out of me.

I walked for a while and turned around. I had seen what I came to see. There is more rotation ahead. A show. Fine dining well away from the casino floor. A baseball game — the A's are in their first season at a new ballpark, and I want to see what that looks like in a city that is still learning what to do with a home team. I do not know yet what Las Vegas holds for me.

The process has not let me down in rural Pennsylvania or small markets or cities that offered nothing obvious on arrival. I know the man-made wonder and the man-made spectacle are not the same thing, and that I drove toward one first because I needed a starting point before I was ready to deal with the city.

That first evening was not an escape. It was preparation. The Strip at 5 a.m. did not resolve anything. It simply marked the beginning.

That is enough to be here.