Seeking An Extraordinary Life - A Travel Journal

We stagger out into the cool Vegas night at a little after 2am on an unstoppable high and with a taste for clubbing, and after trying three different casino nightclubs (two closed and one costing $20-$30 per head) we end up at Seamless, which is a strip club until 3am and then becomes an after-hours nightclub. Actually we arrive a little early and it's still a strip club. We get a table at the foot of the stage, two Sprites for $7.00 each and watch the last of the show.

Frankly we both find the dancers uninteresting and a bit depressing - they're uniformly beautiful, but they all have the same dead-eyed, fixed, emotionless expressions and there's no pleasure or enthusiasm in their performances, with the exception of one girl with beautiful full-body tattoos and a bob haircut who really seems to be enjoying herself, playing around on stage, laughing and messing with the guys in the front row, and is consequently far sexier and more fun to watch.

The strippers are actually totally eclipsed by the go-go dancers who appear at 3am to dance at the front of the bar - happy, tan and chunky darkhaired girls in outfits trimmed with strips of flourescent material that trail around them as they spin and hop and weave, full of grace and joy in the movement.

When the girls come off the stage and a DJ moves up, the atmosphere remains pretty much the same - there are six people on the dancefloor, all posers in thick jewelry who stand on the spot and sway slightly, and everyone else is occupied in schmoozing or pawing the remaining strippers who move around the tables. We decide to move on.

Feeling our energy dipping we spend an hour or two in the Durango Lodge, a 24-hour bar built as one high round wooden room with a circular bar in the middle and comfortable sofas along one wall. When we feel like moving on again we drive around for a time, then go to hang out with Deidre's friend Che, who is also still up and awake, and catch a couple of hours of sleep on her sofa.

Refreshed by our brief nap and full of energy once again but keen to get free of the city for a while, we head out of town to the extraordinary Red Rock Canyon and drive around for an hour or so. It's an amazing location, a broad valley walled around by huge craggy red rocks in twisted and tortured shapes, breaking into sheer cliffs and narrow columns. It's stunning in the early-morning sun.

We fuel up at a Del Taco with huge steak-filled breakfast burritos, then a fever for shopping seizes us and we spend three hours browsing for clothes. We form an unstoppable shopping team, charging up and down the aisles, scouting ahead for bargains and mis-shelved sizes and picking out particularly hideous items for an appreciative "EEEEWWWW!" Our energy finally spent we collapse at Paymon's Mediterranean Restaurant for perfect dolmades and pots of amazing tea. The rest of the afternoon and evening is spent on the sofas in front of a few good movies as we slowly slide into unconsciousness.