This past weekend, we attended the Best of Missouri Market and Shaw Art Fair, both held in the vicinity of the Missouri Botanical Gardens. We went with our friends, Anne Schulte Basler, and her son, Jackson. (He would say that I was mean, and that I was yelling at him for whatever reason if I didn't mention his name!) :P
(Now, I'm yelling at him!):
Because he is a talented young gardener, and he is sharper than the average bear, I would expect him to take his time and to have a detailed look at the oldest botanical garden in the United States, the Missouri Botanical Gardens. He was, instead, enthralled by "Geocaching" on a smart phone. We did have an enjoyable time, and we did locate one cache that was located within the gates of the Botanical Gardens, and there was another one, not far away, in Tower Grove Park (the home of the oldest green house west of the Mississippi River).
Before I delve into this realm, there are some housekeeping duties that we have to attend to. To catch you up to speed on my general position concerning 'smart phones', please read the following blog first. It is another of my blog entries:
http://mrtoadslivingoutloud.blogspot.com/2011/03/buying-live-digital-chicken-in.html
Quoting Wikipedia's definiteion:
"Geocaching is an outdoor sporting activity in which the participants use a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or mobile device] and other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers, called "geocaches" or "caches", anywhere in the world.
A typical cache is a small waterproof container containing a logbook where the geocacher enters the date they found it and signs it with their established code name. Larger containers such as plastic storage containers (tupperware or similar) or ammunition boxes can also contain items for trading, usually toys or trinkets of little value. Geocaching is often described as a "game of high-tech hide and seek", sharing many aspects with benchmarking, trigpointing, orienteering, treasure-hunting, letterboxing, and waymarking.
Geocaches are currently placed in over 100 countries around the world and on all seven continents, including Antarctica.. After 10 years of activity there are over 1,532,000 active geocaches published on various websites. There are over 5 million geocachers worldwide."
For more information, this is a link to the entire article on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocaching
Geocaching's official website::
http://www.geocaching.com/
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We need to get this thing back on track, yet doing so requires another detour.
Mark and I went Las Vegas 7 or 8 years ago. I really want to go back, and cover the areas that we didn't get to see during our initial short 3 day visit. We missed the Luxor, Mandalay Bay, Excalibur, New York, New York, The Venetian, and the other hotels in that area. My energy never ran out, but, alas - time waits for no man!
At any rate, our flight from St. Louis to Las Vegas was not direct. We had to connect through Houston (!!!) I have since filed this little flight plan under the category of "Things to avoid, if at all possible, in the future!" Even though we had only 15 minutes between flights, our total flight time was almost doubled to 6 hours. The airline(s) later apologized for the inconvenience. Pardon the pun, but as luck would have it, the gate that we arrived at was as far away as possible from the gate that we were to depart from in just a few short minutes after our arrival at the connecting airport. In a round-about way of apologizing, the airline(s) arranged for a golf-cart sized buggy to pick us up at one gate, and quickly whisk us to our departing flight.
We arrived at Las Vegas' Mc Carran International Airport later in the evening (9:30 PM), and took a shuttle from the airport to the hotel that sponsored our trip, the Rio Hotel and Casino. (Rio Roses sponsored the trip as a prize that Mark won from his employer in a rose-selling contest they held around Valentine's Day)
As a matter of coincidence, the Rio Casino and Hotel has the largest Buffet in Last Vegas! I am a true Foodie!
Anywho....back to the trip from the airport to our hotel.
We were on the shuttle back, and honestly - as "luck" would have it - our hotel / casino was the last stop for this shuttle. In other words, we had to go past every other casino on the strip. As anyone can attest, the hotels are quite a site by day, and are absolutely stunning when lit at night. This long round-about trip to our hotel gave us a fantastic sight-seeing opportunity, and at least from the outside, we got a glimpse of every hotel on the strip.
I did NOT have my camera with me, and even though I am a 'slightly' better-than-average photographer, unless I have ample time at my destination, I will not take my camera with me to such destinations. You ask, "Why not?"
The memory that you are making is only that of you looking through a camera lens because you were too busy looking through that lens to actually enjoy the pure, unadulterated scenery.
Through this medium (a blog), I cannot possibly portray to you the number of people that I see - on a regular basis - "missing the moment" because they are not living in the moment. They are too busy taking pictures of their children standing in front of some tourist trap, or they are too busy taking pictures of the tourist trap, itself, to live in the here-and-now. In essence, they have missed the entire reason they are there! If you go to a beautiful place in this world only to take pictures, and you never bother to enjoy the beauty, yourself, then why not save yourself the time and money, and stay home and look at pictures that other people might have taken, and perhaps, those photographers have done a better job?
Back to the shuttle bus:
While I will do everything in my power to avoid losing absolute control of myself (and to avoid looking like a damned tourist!) I do like to see it all! I want to see BOTH, the tourist traps, and the places where the work-a-day man lives, eats, and seeks entertainment. There is more to life than tourist traps, and in most instances, the places that people live everyday lives is infinitely more interesting than the tourist traps.
Remember: This was 7 - 8 yrs. ago, and I was so bothered by this scene that it could have been yesterday or 25 years ago. I will never forget it!
While we were on the shuttle, going by the hotels, I did happen to glance across the isle of the shuttle bus. I noticed a gentleman with a small video recorder in his palm, and his eye was tightly glued to the eye piece of the thing. He wasn't missing one second of filming his trip down the Las Vegas strip. HOWEVER....not for one second did his eye leave that lens. Not one second. In essence, and in all actuality, he missed the entire trip! Even for a fraction of any second of that shuttle trip, that man never saw one actual glimpse of the beautiful Las Vegas Strip! He was too busy recording that video, and missed the entire 'show'!
I looked at Mark, and I said right out loud, and in front of God and everybody present: "God, I hope this is not his first and only trip down the magnificent Las Vegas Strip. If I EVER do that (miss the entire 'show' !), as a result of my own stupid actions, I miss the awe and beauty, please shoot me and shoot me quickly!"
Geocaching is fun, and actually encourages people to 'get off the couch'. In the words of Martha Stewart, "That is a 'good thing'.
I will not, however, 'miss the entire show' to do such a thing, and I would recommend you to do the same. The next time, I would strongly encourage you, young Jack, to do BOTH: Geocaching and enjoy the entire Missouri Botanical Garden without being distracted.
I will not do such a thing, however, until the price of chickens in Guadalajara is greatly reduced!
- Michael
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