Las Vegas, Expensive, Strange, and Exactly as Revealing as I Needed It to Be

In June 2026 I went to Las Vegas for the first time, a short trip, Friday night to Monday afternoon, built around one thing: seeing No Doubt at the Sphere on Saturday night. On paper it was a classic Vegas weekend: a nice hotel, a major concert, the Strip, the casinos, the heat, the spectacle. In practice, it turned out to be the trip that showed me, very clearly, that Vegas is not my place.

The state I arrived in

I came into this trip tired. I’d been under a lot of stress, and more than anything I wanted to protect my energy for the concert. I wasn’t looking for a wild, reckless weekend, I wanted the trip to feel special, but I also wanted it to feel manageable. Vegas, as I quickly learned, is not exactly designed around “manageable.” We flew in from St. Louis and stayed at Encore at Wynn Las Vegas, and built the whole weekend around that one Saturday-night show.

What No Doubt means to me

To understand why I’d fly to a city I’d never seen and build a whole weekend around one night, you have to know how far back No Doubt goes for me.

I was about eight years old, in third grade, when “Don’t Speak” was all over the radio in 1996. This was before a young kid had a stack of CDs or tapes; if you wanted to hear a song, you listened to the radio, and my parents had taught me that you could call the station and request one. I’ve always been a shy person, and I still remember calling in in front of my entire family and, in my nervousness, asking to hear “No Speak”, mashing the band’s name (No Doubt) together with the song (“Don’t Speak”). My parents and my brother laughed so hard at the mix-up. I was mortified. It’s one of those core memories that never leaves you, and somehow it bonded me to this band for life.

I followed them all the way through: No Doubt, then Gwen Stefani’s solo career, then a long quiet stretch, then Rock Steady (a great album), then another long hiatus. From my recollection it had been the better part of fifteen or twenty years since they’d really come together to play. So the moment I learned they were performing, I knew: if I could ever see No Doubt, I had to. I was a little late to the game, but I found tickets, and that was that.

Inside the Sphere

The Sphere is almost impossible to describe at scale. It’s a huge, huge, huge auditorium, you step inside and it’s like standing in some giant atmospheric space, surrounded by pixels of light and color streaming in from every edge of your vision. The band members get blown up into enormous, vivid images so you can see every detail. The sound system was phenomenal, and the seats themselves vibrate with the music, a detail I did not expect and absolutely loved.

And then there’s Adrian Young, who has been my favorite drummer of all time for as long as I can remember. I love that he just doesn’t care about anybody’s standards, he’ll play in a pink dress and a schoolgirl-style outfit with glossy red lipstick, and I think it’s the coolest thing in the world. That’s more or less how he was dressed at the Sphere, and seeing it in person made me so happy.

But the moment I’ll keep forever was small. At some point foam oranges dropped from the ceiling (an orange being the band’s old Tragic Kingdom signature), I’d half-guessed something like that might happen. Nicholas was sitting on the aisle, so he simply reached over, grabbed one, and handed it to me like it was nothing. I can’t fully explain what that did to me. To love someone, and have them know, without being told, how much a foam orange falling from the sky would mean to you, and to just give it over… I have rarely felt so loved in a single gesture.

And I knew every single word. I’ve loved these songs almost by heart my whole life, and I got to sing along to nearly all of them. Here’s the setlist, as best I have it:

Tragic Kingdom · Excuse Me Mr. · Different People · Total Hate ‘95 · Spiderwebs · Underneath It All · Hey Baby · Bathwater · Ex-Girlfriend · Happy Now? · Hella Good · The Climb · Running · It’s My Life (Talk Talk cover) · Simple Kind of Life · Don’t Speak · Trapped in a Box · New · End It on This · Just a Girl · Sunday Morning

By the time I finally saw them, Gwen is 56, and Tony, Adrian, and Tom are all mid-to-late fifties themselves. I’d always figured maybe I’d catch them when they were older, but they’re still right in their prime, and they played fantastically.

Everything felt expensive

Outside that one room, the dominant feeling was cost. The flights were expensive. The hotel was expensive. The concert tickets were expensive. Even the idea of food felt like it required strategy. Everything in Las Vegas costs an astronomical amount, nothing is given away for free, and genuine hospitality is few and far between. If I’m honest, the whole place felt like a capitalistic nightmare, a giant machine built to separate people from their money while convincing them the separation itself is part of the experience.

That was so far from what I’d expected. From movies like Ocean’s Eleven, and the way people talk about Vegas as a city of entertainment and fun, I’d built up an image of effortless spectacle. I never quite realized that all of it would be so relentlessly, exhaustingly expensive.

We did the classic Strip things, too, wandered the Venetian under its painted-sky ceiling, and (rule’s a rule, even here) got our Kura Revolving Sushi. They were genuinely lovely. But the meter was always running underneath all of it.

Beautiful, but not built for two guys in baseball caps

Encore and Wynn were beautiful in the way Vegas things are beautiful: huge, polished, theatrical, almost unreal. But sometimes that kind of grandeur makes a normal human moment feel out of place. I remember just wanting a simple breakfast and feeling like every option was too formal or too grand, too much event, for two guys in baseball caps who only wanted to eat without it becoming a production.

The breakfast that actually felt human

So the thing that ended up meaning the most was, of course, the least Vegas thing on the trip: our Sunday breakfast, the morning after the concert, at Blueberry Hill, a local family-owned diner (around since the ’60s, open 24 hours, everything made from scratch). Nicholas got the cinnamon pancakes, I stole a bite, and they were amazing, and I got the Californian omelette, loaded with avocado. But the sleeper hero was the side of sourdough bread. It was so good. I’m not exaggerating when I say I still think about that sourdough. In a city built on spectacle, the thing that actually reached me was a piece of bread at an unfussy off-Strip diner, exactly the kind of sincere, unhurried hospitality I’d been looking for the whole weekend.

A long walk to the fountains

By Sunday night I could feel something turning, the first hints of getting sick, but I didn’t want to waste the evening, so we pushed ourselves out the door and walked about 40 minutes down to the Bellagio Fountains. We caught two performances. I can’t recall the first song, but the second was one Nick and I both love, Céline Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.” Standing there in the warm night, the water leaping in time to it, was genuinely lovely, and a little serendipitous, because we’re already planning to see Céline Dion in Paris in 2027. It felt like a small preview of something ahead.

By the end of that walk, though, I was worn down. I wore a mask to bed that night, already bracing for what I suspected was coming.

The casino, and one lucky roulette run

I’ve always been skeptical of casinos. I understand the fantasy of winning, but I also understand that the whole system is built so the house wins. So I treated it as entertainment, not a plan. The slots took my money quickly. Roulette, unexpectedly, went the other way, I was playing American roulette (both 0 and 00 on the wheel, the worse odds) and somehow walked away ahead. I started with about $130, lost roughly $30 to slots, and finished around $260. That’s probably the healthiest possible version of gambling: have fun, get lucky, and leave.

A stranger at the Wynn

There was one moment that soured part of the trip. Inside the Wynn, my boyfriend and a stranger stepped on each other’s feet, the kind of nothing accident that happens in a crowd. Nicholas apologized, but the guy wouldn’t let it go; he wanted to lecture him, and even made a comment about how he looked. I wanted to protect him. I wanted to step in. In the end the best thing I could do was help pull him away from the situation. It bothered me afterward, not only because the man was out of line, but because moments like that can stick with someone who takes things to heart, and Nicholas does.

Coming home with a fever

By the end of the weekend that familiar “uh oh, I’m getting sick” feeling had fully arrived, running nose, sore throat. Our flights were on Southwest (never my favorite airline), and this round was a genuine shit show: delayed both coming and going, a broken seat, and, memorably, water pooled in our seats before we’d even sat down for takeoff. It did my fraying body no favors. I felt terrible the whole way home, and by the time we landed back in St. Louis on Monday I had a 102° fever. I felt absolutely awful. It gave the whole trip a strange ending: a weekend of spectacle, money, heat, noise, and stress; one lucky roulette run; one all-time concert; and then home in bed, burning up.

What Vegas taught me

I don’t think Las Vegas became my place. I understand why people love it, and I also understand why it felt alien to me. I love beauty, technology, cities, lights, food, and big experiences, and Vegas has all of that. But I also care about hospitality, calm, sincerity, and value, and Vegas often felt like it had the surface of wonder without the emotional generosity I actually want from travel.

There’s one more thing this trip gave me, and it’s the reason you’re reading any of this. Somewhere in that feverish, ambivalent comedown, I got the idea to start this very journal: to go back and write down every trip I’ve ever taken, and keep recording the ones still ahead. The weekend that felt least like me is, fittingly, the one that set all of this remembering in motion.

So the trip wasn’t a failure. It taught me something useful.

Sometimes you visit a place and discover that it matches you.

And sometimes you visit a place and discover, very clearly, that it does not.