It was the first and, I hope, last time I will visit Las Vegas. In my twenties and thirties, I traveled a lot for work. I was gone all the time – on the road – away from my family. While the absence from my family was a hardship, the travel was exciting to me. Getting on a plane and going somewhere was an adventure, a voyage, a lifeline to some part of my soul that needed to explore. But I never went to Vegas during all that travel. There was no military base there, and military bases had hospitals that had the need of information systems and a connection to the Internet superhighway (back then, “internet” was spelled with a capital “I”, because it was a thing, a place, a destination. Vegas is definitely a destination, but I think I would have liked it better when I was young and the games were classic, meaning they were done on tables, with a dealer at the helm.
But this trip was not for work. It was for pleasure and exploration – at least exploration for my brain. CrimeCon is a convention that is held once per year at some destination within the United States (although a convention is actually being held in London in a few months), hosting content creators (YouTube channels, podcasts, television true crime news magazines, and more), law enforcement personnel, authors, victims’ families, and more. This CrimeCon also hosted true crime enthusiasts and those who work on the periphery of the genre or investigatorial realm, giving us a place to come together to discuss, learn, and entrench ourselves in our personal passion.
From what I have heard, more than 7,000 of us descended on Las Vegas to join the conference at Caesars Palace, which is where I stayed. I will have to admit to being more than a little excited about the trip, if somewhat reticent about traveling in the time of lingering COVID, Ebola, virulent strains of pneumonia, and general nastiness. It has been a long time since I spent much time around so many people, and each leg of my flights to and from the conference were “fully booked,” according to the airline. No flight took off on time, and before takeoff, many people had to check their bags at the gate, since the overhead bins were full. My earbuds wouldn’t connect to my new iPhone, and I can’t read by the dim lights over the seats, so mostly I just closed my eyes and tried to meditate. When that didn’t work, I tried to stay connected to the in-flight WiFi, which kept failing at random times. I couldn’t do much over the little bandwidth it offered, so I waited patiently to just land.
Caesars Palace is very large. I lost track of how much walking I did, but I’m sure it was far more than my phone registered. My Apple Watch has decided to be stupid, so I left it at home. It keeps asking for my email password over and over and over. No matter what troubleshooting I do, it fails, so I’ve decided it needs to go away. I ordered a $75 Timex watch. No frills, no step tracker. I don’t need them. I’m not a person who normally walks a lot, and I know when I need to get moving. I don’t need gamification of my life to know when I need to exercise. Keep your badges. I’m doing the old-school thing again, though I did get a watch that has large numbers and Indiglo, because – hey – I’m not an animal.
I don’t want to disparage Vegas anymore than I already have because, to be fair, I didn’t see much of it. What I saw was my room, the casino floor, the restaurants, and the conference floors. I never got to meet up with my friends. I didn’t rent a car, because I wouldn’t have wanted to drive on the Strip for any amount of money. And who knows how much the car plus parking would have cost. Everything was expensive. Want a coffee? That’ll be $14 for a caramel macchiato. Want some oatmeal for your in-room breakfast? That plus a mocha will cost you $42. But I was so tired, and my feet hurt so much, that an in-room breakfast was very worth it to me.
Mostly I was on my own. It would have been good to be there with a friend, but I didn’t know anyone who would be interested. I met up for dinner one night with a few people I’ve met through one of the channels I follow, but we didn’t manage to get together again. One thing is for certain, I fell asleep fast every night. I enjoyed the conference sessions, but I got tired of getting lost (because yes, you can get lost inside the hotel!), got annoyed at the rude people who smoked and crowded the casino floor at night (by casino, I mean the multitude of large video-game-like machines that clange and beeped and shouted), and people who nearly ran me over in their scooters. Rude!
Every night I fell asleep saying, “I can’t wait to go home.” Adventure just isn’t what it used to be. I’m much older now, and I like the small Southern town where I live. I don’t want to travel all the time and deal with people. And yet, I signed up for the conference next year in Orlando. It will be a shorter trip in a nicer place, and the hotel is right down the road from Universal Studios. I don’t really do the rides anymore – can’t, because of my neck and back problems – but I get a kick out of the atmosphere. I might be crazy signing up to go to another conference, but I learned so much.
True crime – not sure why it has become such a thing for me. The trials are exciting. The different aspects of the cases are interesting. And I suppose there is an element of “What can I learn so I don’t become a victim?” It’s like knowing something about cybersecurity; you learn how to protect yourself in our totally-online culture. Certainly something could happen to us or to someone we love, but the more we know, you know?
There is a lot more I could say about the conference, and I will do that in future posts. Right now, though, I have some fresh produce waiting for me to go cook it up for dinner. Wandering around the farmers’ market yesterday with people who weren’t trying to push me was far more pleasant than anything I experienced last week! And the berries – mmmm – so good!
Ciao, my lovelies,
Jude
Poetic License 
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