AFTER NEARLY a week of postcard-perfect weather, it is raining on the Outer Banks, a good, hard, steady rain, the kind that leaves no doubt about what kind of day it is. It’s a day to read on the couch, nap on the bed, play cards on the coffee table, and think with gratitude about a restful vacation in one of the world’s nicer corners. We’ll be home soon, back to camp schedules, work email, and household chores. But we’ll have this glorious week to take out of our back pocket when we need a reminder that it’s necessary and possible to flee the real world once in a while and live without alarm clocks, to-do lists, neckties, and morning commutes. | DL
Travel
Leaving Las Vegas, an Epiphany Strikes
New York is not the city that never sleeps. Las Vegas is.
At 4 o’clock last Saturday morning, I left a nightclub inside Mandalay Bay, and while the casino wasn’t quite as busy as when I had walked in a few hours earlier, neither was it silent. Commerce continued; the lights were on. Had my middle-aged body not been reminding me with each exhausted step that I no longer have any business staying up until such hours, I might have thought it was a quiet Tuesday in the early afternoon.
But I’m 43, and there’s no way around that, and while Las Vegas has plenty to offer those of us no longer in the full flower of youth, its more hedonistic charms now exact an ever steeper price.
Dadlibbing 