I am writing this 35,000 feet above the ground and going at 300 mph.

Hopefully I complete this column before I reach home or my editor’s deadline, whichever comes first.

I’m on a flight from Las Vegas to Newark, finishing a vacation.

When vacationing, my family, as many families before me, has a tradition.

The tradition is to cram as many events as is humanly possible within five days.

This is five Earth days, mind. Each of them has only 24 hours.

That hasn’t stopped my parents from booking seven shows, 12 restaurants, and one trip to the Hoover Dam.

The Hoover Dam tour ended up being my favorite part of the trip.

There’s nothing like standing on a bridge, staring at gallons and gallons worth of water in the middle of the desert.

My parents thought it was boring. “It’s just cement,” they said. And they were right, but they didn’t have to be so obnoxious about it.

I thought it was dam impressive.

The most interesting part of the trip after the dam was Cirque de Soleil’s show, “O.”

Why they named it “O” instead of “Epic Circus of Awesomeness” is beyond me, but maybe they were charged per letter.

Maybe it refers to the shape each audience member’s mouth makes while they’re watching.

There were contortionists and acrobats, trapeze artists and… well, swimmers, since part of the show takes place in a pool.

I would have liked it more if I weren’t in the front row, because every time an acrobat dived into the pool, I got soaked.

Since it was late at night once we left “O,” our next natural stop was the High Roller.

It’s a Ferris wheel that swings you up to look over the Strip. That’s five miles of neon lights beneath your feet.

The High Roller just turns… so… slowly. It takes 45 minutes to make a full revolution.

If I typed at the rate that wheel turned around, I definitely wouldn’t finish this column by the deadline. I’m cutting it close as it is.

After the High Roller, we went back to the Paris Las Vegas Hotel & Casino.

Why it has “Paris Las Vegas” in the name is beyond me. I know it’s in Las Vegas, and it has a huge Eiffel Tower built into it, which settles the question of it being Paris.

I guess “Hotel & Casino” was too generic of a name. Besides, there are 278 hotels in Las Vegas. They had to stand out somehow.

I wish I could say I spent the next seven hours gambling and winning enormous amounts of money, but I didn’t.

The one time I fed $20 into a machine, it took it and didn’t even let me play. It’s a good thing I didn’t feed it my credit card.

No, I just went straight to bed. It took a while to fall asleep, with the giant neon Eiffel Tower shining nearby.

But all too soon, the seven shows and 12 restaurants (and one trip to the Hoover Dam) were over. I ended up on a flight and left Las Vegas behind and below me.

Maybe one day, I’ll come back and win a million dollars in a “Hotel & Casino.” Or maybe it’s the other way around.

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Copyright 2025 Alexandra Paskhaver, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Alexandra Paskhaver is a software engineer and writer. Both jobs require knowing where to stick semicolons, but she’s never quite; figured; it; out. For more information, check out her website at https://apaskhaver.github.io.