Last night was a picnic for work. Picnic festivities, then a play at an outdoor theater somewhere in Red Rock Canyon.
I put on some color. I put on some make up. Hell, I even styled my hair to the point where the ever-present horn did not appear. I mean, I was ready for some summer theater fun.
We left around 6:15. Since we've been to Red Rock Canyon before, I figured it wouldn't take more than 45 minutes. I checked Mapquest before we left to find the easiest way to get there from Henderson. (We've always come from the other side during previous trips.) The directions looked easy enough. Go on three roads on which we've traveled before and then make one turn. Okay.
We took Kevin's car. The sun was blinding us. It seemed like we'd been on the road for too long. Kevin suggested that we were lost. I had faith in Mapquest and said, but no, we stay on this road until we turn left onto this other road.
Eventually, I said something that it had never taken this long to get to Red Rock Canyon before, so there was no way that it took this long to get to the other place.
As one point, my phone beeped and I got a voice mail. It let me check the voice mail, but it wouldn't put a call through to anything else.
Most of this was uphill. Kevin's car was struggling. We weren't doing great with gas. For understandable reasons, he didn't want to turn around until we got to a gas station and we could fill the tank. I agreed with this rationale - since we couldn't make an outgoing call, i slowly convinced myself that we were going to break down and be killed by highway pirates.
After some more driving, we saw a sign that said welcome to Nye county. Okay. The town of Pahrump was next. We drove through enough to find a gas station. On the way, there was a billboard advertising the brothel museum. In hindsight, we totally should have stopped to check that out. We filled up with gas and turned around. Since the play had already started at that point, there was no way in hell.
The drive home was a little scary because there are few cars and lots of nothing as far as the eye can see. After some more driving through the middle of nowhere, we saw the entire valley and that stupid Stratosphere. That was a relief. Since we hadn't eaten dinner, I told Kevin that I would take him out.
We ended up at Lotus of Siam and had tasty thai food.
So, yeah, what was supposed to be a work outing and summer theater good time, turned into a scary drive through the middle of nowhere and I'm sure years worth of material for my coworkers. That's fine. I wasn't killed by highway pirates, so it's okay.
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