Vegas… um… yeah. Whatever.

Road trip last weekend. Headed out to Las Vegas, as apparent penance for buying the track bike last month. I was less than impressed. Honestly, after living 10 of the last 14 months in an 8′ by 20′ metal box in the middle of a shit-stain of a country, Vegas just kinda seemed like ringside seats to the impending end of civilization. Think Times Square on PCP. Lots and lots of PCP. Strung out, in your face, overly combative, and manic like a speedball, the Strip was almost disgusting. Don’t get me wrong, the two shows we saw (Terry Fator and the Mystere Cirque du Soleil) were both great, and I have nothing against casinos, in fact, I rather enjoy playing blackjack. But there is definitely a threshold for ‘too much’ that I passed somewhere between the constant “Fully Nude Strippers Direct to your room” cards being handed out along the sidewalks and the herds of people out and about who were completely oblivious to ‘the real world’ as I like to call it.

Just didn’t work for me. They can keep it. Amanda and Susan both enjoyed it, it just wasn’t my thing.

We did stop on the way and see the Grand Canyon, which is only called ‘Grand’ because the standard naming convention only allows the use of one adjective, and thus precluded “The most collossally giant hole on the face of the planet” Canyon being used. I actually WANTED to go base jumping after seeing the cliff faces that just begged for a freefall and parachute ride to the bottom. Vegas pictures will be at the end, but Grand Canyon pictures will be the substance.

For starters:

Since I’ve discovered the panorama-generating functionality in the Windows Live Photo Gallery (download at Microsoft.com), I’ve pretty much given up on the Canon Photostitch software. WLPG actually color-corrects, positions, skews, bows, and rotates photos so they line up with their adjacent bretheren perfectly. I had a couple of focus issues with the giant panorama I’ll be posting further down, but that was because one of the images had focused on the tree 20 feet below me instead of the canyon floor some 2500 feet down… oops. This picture isn’t technically the Grand Canyon itself, but the Little Colorado River canyon that opens into the canyon proper some miles to the north. Still, a 1000 foot sheer cliff face is pretty intimidating…

Next we have the standard ‘hold the camera at arms length and shoot self’ of me at the first overlook you come to in the national park itself:

Amanda didn’t like getting quite as close to the edges as I was comfortable with, but still sat on the boundary rocks for some nice pictures:

Here the small tree and bushes made for an interesting portrait:

The Canyon money-shot:

This is a severly cut-down image to kill load time. If you want to see the entire original picture, you can download it here. Be warned though, it’s 13,719×4062 pixels, which is a 53.1 megapixel image (file size is a shade under 32 megs).