About three weeks ago, i had the privilege of spending some time in southern Nevada with a friend. There are people who are fans of Fallout and then there’s FANS, like my friend Daniel whom i’ve known since we were roommates in college and then again when we both moved to Austin.
He’s seen far more of me than any one person ever should but he has, for reasons that defy logic, always been a friend to me. I… i used to be a very different person and that person wasn’t always worth being a friend to.
But having gone to one with him the previous year, his wife suggested he invite me and Shelly to go with him to the Fallout Fan Celebration in Goodsprings, NV this year. Shelly declined which left me.
And let me start this by saying something i’ve often said in this journal – i really, really, REALLY need to stop writing in it as a last minute thought as my Sunday comes to an end. To that point, let this entry be just a quick introduction to what will eventually become a much more thoughtful and much longer entry.
I was in a bit of a daze for a few days after returning from the desert. The reason being that when confronted with an experience larger than what one is ready to receive, it takes time to process that experience. For the sake of brevity, i’ll just focus on the part that probably had the most profound experience on me – the desert.
The part of Texas i’m from is canopied in rolling hills of limestone and carpeted in cedar trees and oaks. The scrublands of the El Paso region are more traditional desert but other than taking a day trip to Alamagordo for the White Sands National Park, i never spent much time in the area surrounding El Paso.
As we drove to and from Las Vegas to Primm (where we took busses to Goodsprings), we were surrounded by seemingly endless stretches of desert. It was breathtakingly beautiful and serene. It also wasn’t summer, which makes appreciating the desert a much easier thing to do than when it IS summer.
Ummm… i’m more short on time than i intended. I’ll come back to this post soon – hopefully during the evenings over the coming days. And when time permits, i’m going to make a Google Album of pix from both myself and Daniel.
In the meantime, here are a couple of images that will be in that album.
Okay – i have laundry to battle, food to eat and i should probably have a discussion with my razor soon.
More to come.
p.s. it turns out that clicking on the photos doesn’t direct you to a larger size of the image. I’ll see about fixing that.