I lovvvvve Vegas. Here every megahotel is a mini-Disneyland. You can gawk for free. You can spend a fortune on a room above the Bellagio’s $30 million art collection of Gauguins, Picassos, Cezannes, Matisses and Manets... or bed down at the Las Vegas Backpacker’s Resort, a budget motel or a even trailer park. Regardless of room rates, nobody sleeps in Vegas.

The shaman’s crystal gouge, pecking and scratching through the centuries, as Gypsum Period people… Uto... Aztec… Anasazi… Fremont… Shoshone… Paiute… Pueblo… Chemehuevi… and Mojave come and go through Nevada’s Valley of Fire.

Did God make this land? Warped, slashed, torn, squeezed, pounded, twisted, scoured, then set afire? Or was it, as some say, conjured by the Devil himself? The Death Valley map shows Hell’s Gate, Poison Spring, Devi’s Golf Course, Bloody Gap, Skeleton Mine, Desolation Canyon. Starvation Canyon, Coffin Canyon, Suicide Pass, Deadman’s Pass, Deadman’s Gulch, and the Last Chance Mountains. Not exactly names to entice a three-children family in an Airstream Camper!

…on Rodeo Night in Cody, Wyoming

What is life-on-the-edge-of-death like for a bull rider in America’s longest running rodeo? And will his health insurance cover “pre-existing conditions”?

…on a mountain bike

It was my dirty little secret. And even more scandalous because I knew how. I'd done it in hot-blooded Latin Montreal, after 15 years of not doing it at all. And I'd even done it in England, on the left, and in Manhattan at midday. But I was not going to drivein Los Angeles, not even when people said I'd have to or be laughed out of town.