…with a dame
CritterCon 17
CritterCon 17, Trip Day Two
Holy moley, am I ever late posting this! Sorry, folks, but our day was jam packed. In fact, it was so jam packed that we had to add 4 more hours to it via temporal folding.
We woke up at 7:00 AM in Las Vegas in the parking lot of the Luxor with spock now externally looking like a classic Rolls Royce. After a quick breakfast, we all got into our android bodies and went inside to gamble and check out humans in a casino.
It was odd and fun. Blue and Buck won big playing blackjack, many of us played slot machines or poker machines, and everyone talked to humans. We also enjoyed the buffets. Oh, and we all had alcoholic drinks, even though they have no affect on android bodies.
After a couple of hours in the Luxor, we walked a few blocks to the secret entrance of the Las Vegas NHT Shopping Mall and Museum. It’s a big place and pretty historic, being one of the first large NHT gathering sites outside of the US coasts. Created in 1973, it has 90 stores, two theaters, a 10 acre indoor forest, and the museum. We spent 2 hours there and never really saw evrything. We’ll have to go back someday.
After that, we got back on the bus and drove to the southeastern part of town to check out not only the Sloan Canyon Sanctuary, but a Giant Not Jesus Statue. Dad Cross willl perk up when he reads that.
The sanctuary is relatively small at only 2,500 acres, but it is really nice for desert dwelling creatures. It’s located 15,000 years in the past. The Giant Not Jesus Statue is of Bonka, a famous coyote artist and one of Silky’s good friends in her early days of spreading the word about the newly formed NHTA. He died in 1990 after helping thousands of NHT in southern Nevada and northern Arizona get organized.
His statue has him sitting up and looking down at the sanctuary lake. It’s 75 feet tall and you can take a large elevator up to his head and see a great view. Blue, Mara, and Cakes, who have experience with giant statues, were all impressed. We took pix and, maintaining the Cross tradition, bought bumper stickers, fridge magnets, and t-shirts.
Back on board Spock, we headed to Boulder City for a quick takeout burgers, then started down the highway to Arizona. Since it was 2:00 in the afternoon, and we had 10 hours to go the get to Las Cruces AND make 3 stops, wwe had Spock go airborne and fly along at about 200 mph.
We arrived at our first stop, the Desert Art Collective, at just after 3:00 PM. It’s a wonderful collection of found object art and we spent an hour there, which was not long enough.
Our next stop, Grd’ WaMiv, is located near the Tohono O’odham Reservation and is an entire small underground town housing the 3,100 Grd’ Plav extraterrestrials natives of a planet that “pretty much fell apart” back in 2003. Since that planet was very Earthlike, GalCon Relocation sent them here. They are nice folk, small and looking much like humanoid sloth/chickens. We visited them for two hours, before rushing off to head to our final stop at Chico’s Tattoos.
Now, Chico, who died in 2005, was the first NHT tattoo artist in the world. Born in 1965 in Lordsburg, New Mexico, he was also one of the first sapient horses in North America. He set up his tattoo shop in 1990, and became famous doing tats fot NHT of all sorts. That’s no easy thing when most of your customers are covered with fur. His two daughters now run the place, and there are 9 tattoo artists in residence.
Everyone in our group got a tat reading “CritterCon 2024”, with a rainbow over it. I got mine on my neck. I also got Duke’s name on my right ear. There were also a few piercings done. This all took 3 hours.
I need to wrap this up, so I’ll just say we got into Las Cruces at 8:00 PM, ate Mexican food prepared by the onboard staff, watched Deadpool & Wolverine, and then everyone sacked out but me, again.
I’ll write more tomorrow, but for now, I’m gonna sleep my fuzzy butt off.
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