The New York Times

Road Trip From Glitter to Grandeur, and Back

By PORTER SHREVE

Published: November 21, 2004

Gotham in a nutshell at New York-New York Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas. riving at night with the top dropped on our rented claret-red Chrysler convertible, we are swept up in the lights and music, the carnival air of the Las Vegas Strip. My wife, Bich Nguyen, and I love a good road trip -- even got engaged on a cross-country drive -- and we've come to this part of the Southwest for the first time, to experience the promise of the open road on an 800-mile loop around the Grand Canyon. But first we're cruising America's new Main Street, where everything's for sale and the catchier the view the sooner you'll spend your money.

We pass the MGM Grand, Oz-green and tiered like a mountain, the false skyline of New York-New York, then the pink and red lights of Bugsy Siegel's old haunt, the Flamingo. For blocks our eyes find too many vanishing points amid all the color and movement: the Eiffel Tower, the Bellagio fountain, the Caesars Palace marquee trumpeting Celine Dion. At the Mirage, we look up at the enormous billboard and video of Danny Gans, a singer-comedian-impressionist who morphs from Dean Martin to Garth Brooks to Macy Gray. No surprise in a town built on imitations that The Las Vegas Review-Journal named Gans Best Hotel Headliner.

Looping back at Fremont Street, I'm reminded of the architect Robert Venturi's 1972 book, "Learning From Las Vegas" (written with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour), which celebrated this place as a standard-bearer and called for an acceptance of the "kitsch of high capitalism." Las Vegas is now the fastest-growing city in America; kitsch has spread all over the world; and on the Strip it's video, not just signs, that draws you in. Cascading lights and neon compete with half-naked acrobats flying across enormous TV screens. Driving Las Vegas Boulevard, particularly in an open car, you almost feel a part of the entertainment, as if you're Liberace arriving onstage in a rhinestone-studded Duesenberg. In this way, Venturi was right: Las Vegas offers more than eye-catching views; it makes anyone feel like the star of the show.

This place has been called the adult Disneyland, or, as my wife says, "recess from the real world," but it's also a great museum town. There's the Guggenheim Hermitage at the Venetian, the Gallery of Fine Art at the Bellagio, the Las Vegas Natural History Museum. The whole city is an exhibit, too, though the displays are replicas of actual treasures and monuments. We find three museums that seem to cater to the road: the Imperial Palace Auto Collection, the Liberace Museum and the Neon Museum.

In the Imperial Palace Casino the 80's never die. Convinced by Bich that Kenny Loggins's "Footloose" is a lucky song, I put $5 in the quarter slots and turn them quickly into $18. When the music segues into Martika's "Toy Soldiers" we head up to the auto collection, where, as it turns out, most of the cars are for sale. The Imperial Palace is probably the world's largest classic-car showroom, with more than 300 of the rarest and most gorgeous automobiles. You'll find the 1929 Duesenberg that Elvis drove in "Spinout" and Marilyn Monroe's 1959 Cadillac Fleetwood from her final film, "The Misfits."

But the rare cars are the real draw: million-dollar Bentleys and Rolls-Royce Phantom II's, a 1961 Aston Martin racecar valued at $3 million. Bich falls for the 1948 Cadillac convertible coupe, custom designed with white top, violet body and lilac canework along the doors. I like the 1933 Pierce-Arrow Silver Arrow, said to be one of three left in the world and the only one for sale, at a relatively affordable $1.45 million.

At the Liberace Museum the collection of sequined, gold and hot pink cars is here to stay; the idea at this shrine to excess and outrageousness is preservation. The pianos, jewels and clothes are sensational: rhinestone-encrusted Baldwins, a 450-carat blue sapphire ring, Anna Nateece furs and a room full of bejeweled and feathered outfits, some of which weigh as much as 200 pounds.

More than his musical virtuosity or legendary showmanship, I'm struck by how beloved Liberace is. Our tour guide, a blonde octogenarian decked out in black pants and a sequin vest, is certainly smitten, as is the woman in front of me at the gift-shop cash register, whose bill, for imitation jewelry and knickknacks, comes to $591. And it's little wonder: the hair, the teeth, the style -- Liberace was one of the world's highest- paid pianists, but he was also good to his mother, and he doted on his 26 dogs. Our tour guide never mentions "Lee's" sexuality, only saying that he was put off marriage because his parents had divorced. Permanently single and charming, he must have seemed to his fans almost available, yet arrayed in such costumes, celestial all the same. Liberace still symbolizes not just flamboyance but a never-ending dream.

From this everlasting glitter we travel to a place where the lights have gone out permanently. The Bureau of Land Management recently granted the Neon Museum $4.5 million to help develop a site for its collection of outdated Vegas signs. But for now the tours are appointment-only and the museum is open-air. Our guide, a friendly woman in her 20's in a black baseball cap with an alien head embroidered on it, takes us around the "Neon Boneyard," two gravel lots, nearly a city block each and enclosed by high fences.

We wander among the discarded treasures, most from the Young Electric Sign Company (Yesco), a neon pioneer since 1920 and provider of many of the signs in Las Vegas. The yards spill over with recognizable icons: the old aqua letters from Caesars Palace, vintage marquees from El Cortez, the Golden Nugget and Sassy Sally's from Fremont Street (aka Glitter Gulch). At the moment there's no order to the collection, no labels or chronologies, just a fantastic collage of gigantic old beacons. The lamp from the Aladdin shares space with the giant heeled shoe that used to rotate over the Silver Slipper. The king from the Coin Castle Casino sticks out his potbelly not far from the charred remains of Mr. O'Lucky, who used to wave his green hat above Fitzgerald's but burned in a yard fire the week before our visit.

These signs, meant to draw travelers off the road and into the depths of the casinos, now appeal to nostalgia, reminding us how quickly our best hopes and bright flashes of beauty become obsolete. Museums have often been criticized for taking artifacts out of context and placing them in stale, white-walled rooms, but the Neon Boneyard is perhaps the only display I've been to where the pieces are more beautiful because they are out of context.
Everyone's a globe-trotter in Las Vegas, where New York to Paris is a 10-minute drive. But the next day we leave the city behind, stopping first for road food at In-N-Out Burger, then opening the top to a cloudless, 85-degree fall afternoon. Only 10 miles northeast of Las Vegas on Interstate 15, we're already in the pale, desolate Great Basin, wondering how the city behind us could have sprung from this interminable desert. At the 35-mile mark we make our first detour through Route 169: Valley of Fire State Park. Stopping often for views, we drive six wind-swept miles around eerie Navajo sandstone formations of brilliant red rock. The silence of this place is a shock after Las Vegas, and we're practically the only ones here. It prepares us for our next stop, Zion National Park in Utah, where Route 9 through the mountains will prove to be the most stunning drive of the trip.

In so many car commercials we see a self-satisfied couple driving along a sublime and empty mountain road. I've often wondered if this could happen in the real world. But Route 9 through Zion actually fulfills the promise. We pull over for views half a dozen times along the precarious, switchback road, but the joy is the driving, 25 miles of twists and turns as close to hiking up a summit as you can get on four wheels. Sheer white-and-red sandstone cliffs as high as 2,500 feet rise around each corner, shaped and striated by centuries of wind and erosion. The Zion-Mount Carmel tunnel barrels through a mountain, with window cutouts spilling light and scenery into the darkness. Everything is more vivid and immediate with the top down. In a poem in which she praises driving, Nikki Giovanni writes about "the power within my toes," and we feel the butterflies at each curve, and also that sense of power, of climbing to the sky.

We spend the night at the Desert Pearl Inn in Utah, where beams of old-growth Douglas fir rescued from an old train trestle blend with the landscape. Then it's back to the convertible, and miles of open road ribboning out toward new vistas. We see only one other car during the 24-mile detour along Route 43 to the beachlike Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park. Then Route 67 to the Grand Canyon's North Rim takes us through Kaibab National Forest. Ponderosa pines rise high on either side of us and quaking aspens, yellow-leafed this time of year, shine like Liberace's gold lame blazers. Anticipating the canyon, which neither of us has seen, Bich says something that seems to me definitive: "Travel is the endless pursuit of the perfect view."

At last we arrive at the North Rim itself, where the Grand Canyon Lodge sits 8,200 feet above sea level, perched on the rim. The weather has turned chilly here. We hike to several lookout points, and the wind seems to kick up just as we make our way out to a ledge or promontory. We retreat to the lodge's sunroom, where wide windows offer brilliant views into the canyon at sunset. There's a calm about the place, as if everyone is trying to take in the whole panorama at once. The early Grand Canyon geologist Clarence Dutton summed up the feeling well: "Dimension means nothing to the senses, and all we are left with is a troubling sense of immensity."

Bich and I are troubled, too, but by another feeling we won't fully understand until the next day at the Grand Canyon's South Rim.

To get there, we drive lonely Alternate Route 89 past Marble Canyon and the Vermilion Cliffs, then detour to Tuba City for delicious Navajo tacos at the Tuuvi Cafe. We head for the South Rim along Route 64, the Desert View Drive. Like Route 9 through Zion, the trip runs 25 miles, but rather than pulling right off the road to catch a breath and a view, we follow clearly marked turnoffs to crowded parking lots and paths to vantage points. The road is winding, but there's little sense of climbing. We stop at the 70-foot Watchtower and at various points along the way -- Lipan, Moran, Grandview. We park the car and join other tourists for posed photos in front of guardrails and along the unnerving limestone edge.

Once we arrive at the Grand Canyon Village, much more populated and built up than the north side, we walk along the rim and venture a way down the Bright Angel Trail. Amid tourists peering into binoculars, hikers climbing up in expensive gear, even men dressed in business suits and women in high-heeled shoes, the feeling we'd had at the North Rim returns: a touch of guilt for preferring the drive through Zion to this indescribably breathtaking view. Perhaps we're accustomed to moving rather than to stopping for still pictures, or maybe it's unfair to compare the thrilling drive up Zion to the tranquil majesty of the Grand Canyon. If travel is searching for the perfect view, then road trips want a view that continues. Though spectacular -- one of life's must-sees -- the Grand Canyon is a terminus, and what driver wants to reach the end of the road?

The next morning, after watching sunrise and sipping coffee on the porch of El Tovar Hotel, we get back on the highway. We stop in Williams, Ariz., for chorizo eggs at Old Smokey's, a cafe where Elvis and Chubby Checker once ate, then head west for our longest detour yet. With the radio tuned to oldies, we follow the original "Main Street of America," historic Route 66, through barely breathing towns like Seligman and Hackberry. This road, too, is lonely, drivers having long ago abandoned it for Interstate 40.

In Seligman, we visit Delgadillo's Sno Cap Drive-In, a kitschy roadside grill festooned with junk: postcards, photos, bumper stickers and slightly off-color signs. We tour Juan's Garden, a parade of fake flowers, plastic dinosaurs, broken-down Chevys, painted toilets and mailboxes. But on this day we're the only takers. Juan Delgadillo recently died, and we ask his cheerful son Bob about a town up the road, but he tells us that he's never been. "I'm stuck here," he shrugs and we notice the sign on the rusted 1970 Chevy: "Our Last Family Car." Like the Neon Museum, the Sno Cap Drive-In is a relic from bygone days made remarkable for its enduring good humor in the face of obvious desolation.

Our final stop before returning to Las Vegas is Hoover Dam, where we park on the Arizona side and walk over the dam into Nevada. We go down to the base surrounded by the three and a quarter million cubic yards of concrete that hold back Lake Mead, then we ride the elevator up to the outdoor overlook. At the edge of the sheer 770-foot drop I look across the vast expanse of poured concrete, and down at the tamed Colorado River journeying south. The view is nearly as impressive as the Grand Canyon, but more terrifying for the starkness of that single curved wall and the power lines webbing around it. In the 1930's, thousands of men worked on this massive project; 96 of them died. The dam brought water and power to the Southwest and California, and is still considered one of the engineering wonders of the world. In her essay "At the Dam," Joan Didion imagined this place outlasting humankind.

That night, back in Las Vegas, Bich persuades me to ride to the top of the Eiffel Tower. "For one last view," she says. High above the city, safely caged, we see the Strip blazing north toward Fremont Street and south toward the airport; the Bellagio fountain beginning its show on cue, blaring "Rondine al Nido," and everywhere around us the lights of cranes, people working into the night to make the desert glow.