Mab of Dream

My last full day in Vegas. *meep* Though I knew that on some level, it didn't permeate my thoughts all day. I mean that in the sense that it didn't ruin the day, as I was able to forget that little fact. It did seem like I'd only been there five minutes though.

Stephane had sorted out what was needful to scan his photos in. We don't know how the scanner had suddenly stopped working beforehand, though I suspect it was with me tatting the day before, pressing the icon on any likely thing which would start the scanner up. But it was sorted now and I set about scanning in the 60-odd pics that he had taken, mainly of the Wiccaning, and adding those to the shared folders.

He asked if there was anything that I'd really like to do before leaving Vegas (you mean other than work out how to stay?), and there were only two things - one was go to Albertsons to stock up on cheap things; the other was more vague - Pixie and Corey had both mentioned Mt Charleston as a good place to see, both saying that they hoped I would be able to see it while I was here. Stephane said that both of these things could be done.

So off we meandered to Albertson's, where I first bought a couple of all the contact lense solutions, to stock me up for home. In sterling, one of the solutions costs £20 here, but cost £3 there. See my point? Then we perused the alcohol section. I was going to get some Jameson's, as even that is cheaper. How come it's made in Dublin and ends up cheaper halfway across the world than it does in either Eire or Britain, I haven't a clue, but there you go. However, once confronted with several shelves of whisky, I decided it would be nicer to try whisky that you can't get back home. Unfortunately, Stephane is tee-total (or doesn't drink whisky, one of the two), while I hadn't tried any of them. Therefore it was a bit pot-luck. I ended up with a Kentucky whisky and one called Canadian Mist. They were in plastic bottles, which I thought would be better for transporting home.

(Since then, I took the Kentucky whisky up FT Kate's at Samhain. I can't remember much about it, which either means that I was too bladdered to remember, or it's unopened at Kate's house. The Canadian Mist is half-full here. It's 80% proof and both Dad and I like it. Maggie tried it yesterday and found it very strong. This is a Scottish woman with a very discerning taste in whisky. All told though, it gets the thumbs up.)

After that, it should have been a simple thing to get 200 cigarettes (my legal allocation) to take home. I'd decided (after experimenting with various types of fags all week) to either get the B&H superkings, as Brianne had bought me, as they aren't like B&H at home - there isn't that strong chemical taste with American B&H - or the Winston, which Brian had crashed me on the Tuesday. I went up to the counter and was peering over to see what they had, with the bloke next to me giving me weird looks. I just ignored him, vaguely wondering whether he was a bit weird himself. Then the lady behind the counter told me off.

Ok... found another cultural difference! :-D In America, you don't save time by looking to see what you are going to buy, while someone else is being served. They prefer you to step right back from the counter and just know what you're going to buy. I did step back and then the lady gave me a withering look, 'Please can you move THIS side of the counter?' pointing. Ok... another one. In Britain, it's either blatantly obvious where to queue or else you just queue. There it's definitely on the left-hand side. So I moved, by now thinking 'ground just swallow me, please!' Yet another look, 'behind the line!' Only then did I notice, right behind the wall a line drawn on the floor. So THIS is where they like you to stand.

By now, Stephane had finished paying for his shopping and he and William were standing there watching. He gave me a big grin, which stopped me feeling like I'd just committed a federal crime and I felt the blush dying down. Then he pointed out a sign, which was only visible if you'd been on the left-hand side of the counter in the first place, 'please queue here'. Now that would have been quite useful on the right-hand side, with an arrow. By now, it was only embarrassment at keeping Stephane waiting as long as I had that stopped me saying, 'fuck this for a game of soldiers' and going somewhere else. There was also another sign, something about 'canelling your cheques', which Stephane pointed out to make me laugh.

The REALLY daft thing was when I finally got to be served (literally about five or ten minutes later), the shop assistant acted as if she was my best friend. 'Hello, how are you?' (Me? I'm feeling extremely embarrassed, because my friend there with the baby has been kept waiting for ages; and I'm a Virgo, so telling me off three times over being in the wrong place - even though I know it's a culture thing that I couldn't possibly have known about in advance - is still enough to make me want to curl in a corner and die. We're the star-sign that has to have the right change on buses or else we feel like everyone is glaring at us. Also, I'm really thirsty and dying for a fag, but not sure if I can sneak one between now and the minivan, and I don't want to ask my friend to wait any longer over my nicotine addiction, and I don't want to smoke in the minivan where there's a small baby in the back. I know as well that if my friend Kate was here, she'd be doing the 'get a job you like' line around about now, but I'm just standing here thinking, 'how bloody false can you get? Making me feel like that and now acting like you're so glad I came to buy off you. Have you got any depths? What is it with this 'oh I love you' bloody attitude anyway, when a few minutes ago, you were making me feel like shite?!) Naturally I replied, 'fine, how are you?' Then bought the fags and left. Which probably makes me as false as she was.

I did have a fag, btw, I smoke very fast and I took the trolley back, which meant I finished it. I would have taken the trolley back anyway, just in case you're thinking, 'you devious cow', as Stephane had to strap William in, so it's just teamwork, innit?

After that, Stephane, William and I drove up to Mount Charleston. As we first left the desert (yes, I know it's probably ALL desert, but I mean the bit that looks like one), we went around a bend and I got a sudden clairsentient 'Help me!' I got a real sense of someone in extreme danger right there, then it was gone. I mentioned this to Stephane and switched 'it' on full. The feeling I got was that it was a past 'help me', a little piece of residual energy. I noted it as somewhere to send Vegas Grovers to experience that, if they weren't sure of what residual energy was actually like, or if they were developing their psychic skills. If it had been something that I wasn't sure on, or had felt current, I would have asked Stephane to stop the minivan while I investigated. I've had enough of these over the years to trust in it.

I mentioned it later on to Shonna, Chelle and Brianne, and was informed that that area (we couldn't be sure on the specific bend) was an accident hot-spot.

A strange phenomenon occurred with the landscape as we drove higher and higher into the mountain - desert turned slowly but surely into greenery. By the time we were halfway up, it was starting to look like Britain. We passed by a half-built hotel, which the locals had managed to get the building of stopped, and thereon we were in forest. :-D

I love forest. I love mountains. Get forest and mountains in the same place and I'm in paradise. :-D I hadn't any expectations about what it was going to be like up there, but I don't think I expected what was there. The smell of pine was so dense, which is great from my perspective! :-D :-D :-D It looked like I would imagine Sweden to look. Naturally, I've never been to Sweden and so that's not based on anything in reality. Maybe Austria. I've never been there either. It definitely didn't look like anything I'd come to expect in Vegas or the Nevada desert.

There were little chalets, which Stephane informed me you could stay in as a weekend get-away from Vegas. We had already driven past 10-15 really big and posh houses, within view of where we parked. It's quite expensive to live up there and though it looked very beautiful, Stephane said he'd worry about having his family up there, because it's so far from the hospitals in case something went wrong. That got us onto a conversation about herbs and knowing your first aid. I bet that someone up there knew their stuff, particularly with so much greenery to hunt down your herbs and roots. He did have a friend who had lived up there and worked at the Bellagio, which was quite a trek to work and back.


There was food on offer at the large chalet, which was a restaurant/bar/shop/estate agents, but neither of us were hungry. Instead, we bought drinks (well, Stephane bought me a drink) and we sat outside. He'd warned me that it would be cold up there, so I'd put my jeans on and had a jacket in the minivan. It was quite the opposite. My thigh actually burnt THROUGH the jeans! LOL But heat is weird in the Nevada desert. You can be equally ok wearing shorts or jeans, because it's dry heat. I didn't understand what dry heat was before I went there. I do now and I prefer it to normal heat. I now have a much better idea of what to pack for next time.

Stephane and I sat there putting the world to rights... well, the historical world mainly. He's a really interesting bloke, who taught me the history of the French in Canada, while we sat there sipping our drinks, with the smell of pine and that gorgeous scenery all about us. I learned how the Arcadians had been superceded in Arcadia by the Gaelic immigrants, who'd turned it into Nova Scotia. Some of the Arcadians had travelled south, into America, and their accent turned them into the Cajuns. I know a lot about how the Irish and Scottish ended up in Canada and he knew a lot about how the French had ended up there, though he wasn't entirely ignorant of the rest. I really enjoyed that cant. I didn't realize how much I knew about the Celtic dispora into Canada for a start!

Folk are so friendly up there. Us poor reserved Brits have to really re-arrange our cultural upbringing to cope! First there was a lady who was having a sit-down while her family went for a hike. She was from Florida and had stayed home during the hurricanes. A house ten miles away was totalled, and houses in the opposite direction were totalled too, but she had nothing happen to her home at all. She usually went travelling with a friend. Originally she and her husband had travelled, but when he was dying, he made her promise to go and see all the places that they hadn't yet seen. She had done so alone, but on one of the trips had met and befriended another widow doing the same thing. The pair of them decided to carry on all future trips together, but right now the friend was ill.

Secondly, there was a couple who walked by. The woman, seeing the carry-cot turned away from the sun, came peering in. 'Ooooooh! Isn't he just adorable?!' She exclaimed to me, Stephane and the entire of Mount Charleston, before reaching in and giving him his bottle. Now, had this been Britain, I'd have decked her. All the bristles went up and I was thinking, 'Get the fuck away from my nephew!', which is a fault of mine, I know. If I step back and look, the wench was holding a bottle in William's mouth and saying nice things. Ok, she was addressing them to me (on the assumption that I'm Mummy), while Stephane was responding, but she was actually being nice. I think there's a whole personal space issue with me going on there, particularly when it comes to the little ones. When I asked Stephane on it, after she'd gone, he was of the opinion that that wasn't unusual, though she was a little more overwhelming than most. I wonder what was going on in my stars that day, thinking on it, that was the second time I'd gone all uppity over someone's attitude, though the second was a little less deserved than the first.

I saw a troll! Stephane wasn't quite so convinced. I think he thought it was just a rock poking out from the trees further up the mountain, but it looked like a troll to me. ;-) Look, here's the picture, what do you think?

It was so beautiful that I didn't want to move, but when Stephane suggested we leave to see more pretties, I've learned to trust his judgement of what's beautiful (let's face it, he married Cerr, so I should have known this before) and off we went. It was beautiful, it has to be said. We drove further on up and east into the mountains, though the most gorgeous forest landscape. We stopped once for pictures, then carried on to a place which overlooked the desert for miles.

Stephane waited with William while I went to look. There was a miniature holly growing halfway up, with three ladies oooing and arring over it. One had seen holly in a book, but the others hadn't seen it at all. I confirmed that it was holly as I passed them, to put them out of their misery, and hoped that I didn't sound blase about it. In reality, I was thrilled to hear them so excited. I love hearing and seeing excitement like that in anyone, including strangers.

I reached the end and was looking over the desert, trying to work out if I could see the Sekhmet Temple, when a couple joined me. The bloke had been here a couple of days ago and had met a military bloke there, who had pointed out things on the landscape; so this bloke had now brought his girlfriend back to show her. Of course, there was no way I couldn't eavesdrop, so I was soon included in the conversation. The Nevada Test Site wasn't where the information board said it was, it was... and he pointed out the area for us. Beyond that was Area 51. He told us so many stories of both, things which didn't sound fantastical and things which made me WANT the Nevada Test Site book NOW! I should have listened to myself, I swear it.

What really shocked me was just how close the test was to Vegas. I thought on how they are finding traces of Chernobyl in Gwynedd (Wales) and the distance that had travelled; then looked at Vegas. I could see both Vegas and the test site from this vantage point, and it made me feel slightly ill at the thought. The bloke with me said, 'It's ok, it was all underground, by the 1990s'. But underground is what caused those babies to look like that in Iraq; and they were underground in the 1950s. I developed my theory that Area 51 is nothing to do with aliens, it's to do with mutants caused by the radiation from the test site, which is only about 25 miles away.

He was fascinating to listen to, but I'd been gone a while, so when he started repeating himself, I started heading back to Stephane and William. Another thing, I lit me a fag, took about four drags on the way back and suddenly was gasping for breath. I had to sit down on a rocky wall part-way back and put the fag out. Presumably, that is what an asthma attack feels like. I was struggling so much to breathe, but sitting there, it came back. The whole episode probably didn't last a minute. We got that one sussed though - the altitude. We were over 8,000ft above sea-level by then.

Stephane drove us the rest of the scenic route back into Vegas. I loved Mount Charleston and the surrounds. It's a definite place to visit again. :-D We picked up Elen and drove through rush-hour traffic to get Shonna. Stephane was working, so they needed to swop the cars and hand over the children, then off Stephane went around the corner to the Bellagio, while Shonna drove us home. It was strange, we'd done that routine the week before, but so much had happened, that it felt like a month or more since we'd last picked Shonna up from work like that. *sigh* I wish I was doing it now.

The journey back was a strange one, in a funny way, for me. I've always said that I only get lost in the wider Black Country, because I half know the way; everywhere else, I don't know it, so follow signs and maps, or I know it like the back of my hand. I'd travelled around Vegas so much, that I was starting to half know it. At one point, Shonna phoned Chelle and I looked up and decided that we were only around the corner and hadn't that been a quick journey. Er... nope, we were still halfway across Vegas! LOL It happened again when I thought we were on the right road to be getting a cafe latte with cinnamon syrup. Nope, we were a good 20 minutes away. LOL Because I kept thinking I knew where we were, that journey took forever, but there was cool, because I was enjoying the journey. We spotted a car with a back-window full of pentagrams and the like, but couldn't see the driver to see if it was a Vegas driver. Another idiot cut Shonna up pretty badly and was lucky that he didn't end up as a frog.

Eventually we had both cafe latte and were in Chelle's 'hood, because luckily Shonna did know the place like the back of her hand. Chelle came back with us for my last night there. She'd made up the soaps and such that I'd asked for, including a sandalwood and patchouli body lotion (which I put on last night after my bath, and wow, it smells beautiful!), and a lavendar soap that she was just developing. Everything was gorgeous! I tried to pay for them and she wasn't having it. She said that it's the least she could give me for all I give her. Give her? I'd only opened her beer for her!

A little while on, Brianne came over too, with more presents! I had a copy of her CD, 'Forever', with more to give away back home. Of course, the first thing I did was open it and have her sign it. :-D

The three of us just chilled out for a couple of hours, canting, trying not to already miss each other while we were still in the same room. We ate pumpkin pie, which I didn't realize was sweet. I thought it was something you had with a meal with gravy. I wished more than anything that I'd come for the two weeks, instead of 10 days (two of which were spent travelling). Eight days just simply wasn't long enough. With cuddles and hugs (and me determined that I wasn't going to cry), Brianne went home again.

The air was getting dense, as if every ghost in Vegas had decided to hang around. Chelle, Shonna and I were all getting it. You could see it dancing in the air, and none of us were drunk. At one point, Chelle and I went outside for a fag, doing our last minute catch-up and goodbye thing, when I needed to ask Shonna something. I got to the door, and just stopped dead. That room was alive! Shonna just looked at me and said something like, 'are you getting it too?' I could just nod. It was a little like when the electricity had gone out on me, Pixie, Corey and Dirk, the air just prickled. Every psychic alarm bell was going off.

I learned that night that I could be a medium, though if television mediums experiences are like that, then I don't know how they survive. I literally threw up afterwards and I was ill for a good hour, before it all passed. It came from nowhere, stunned us all, then went again. Maybe with practice I could do it more easily, but the way it was, I think I'd better wait a while before trying again and only then in the presense of as competent witches as Shonna and Chelle.

Shonna drove Chelle home and I nipped upstairs and quickly did most of my packing, though it was obvious that it all wasn't going to fit into the suitcase. I'd left a lot there, mainly because the bulk of what I'd bought with me was presents, but I was also taking a lot of presents back. I was on edge, feeling as though if I turned too suddenly, I would find several ghosts around the room just looking at me. I battened down the hatches inside me, but still had to check on Elen and William, just to make sure. It isn't that ghosts will hurt you, they just kick off the flight, fight or fear thing inside me, so I go on red alert. I'd already tidied Shonna's living room, full of nervous energy in the immediate aftermath.

By the time Shonna was home though, I had found that quiet place inside me and was calmly finishing off the packing. It was never going all in, so Shonna suggested I get a bigger hand-luggage. She was going to lend me a bag, but I got it all fitted in a carrier-bag well enough and hoped that would get me in. She sorted out the labels to stick on them all.

I don't think either one of us wanted to go to bed that night. Stephane came home from work and we were still up, canting. We were up until very late, but in the end it couldn't be put off any longer and we went abed.