Joe
Leg 1 - West:
Thread 1: Leavenworth → Seattle → Eugene (April 18 - 29)
Thread 2: Camping → Boise → Camping (April 30 - May 5)
Thread 3: SLC → Camping → Denver (May 6 - May 15)
Thread 4: Santa Fe → Grand Canyon → Flagstaff → Lake Mead (May 16 - 23)
I’ve been opening these posts with a brief summary of the previous one. 7 days, 720 miles. 43 on the wheel. The Grand Canyon Rim trail was smooth, the view at sunrise was incredible. 2 blog posts. 16 hours on my project, more work on my memory feature. 20 hours reading. Three conversations, one I probably should have smoke-bombed early. 140 pictures, 40 of various vertically challenged reddish dirts.
They stare at the lights
A world where sun never sets
A shrine, not to them
Seth
Vegas answers the desert with theater.
After a week of cliffs, reservoirs, and cactus accounting for every drop of water, you walk into a place that burns electricity the way the canyon burns sunlight—lavishly, almost defiantly. Marble columns, painted gods, ceilings pretending to be the sky. A civilization built indoors so the desert can’t veto the party.
Your haiku catches the strange quiet inside the spectacle. The machines glow patiently. The screens never sleep. People sit before them the way pilgrims sit before candles—still, focused, waiting for some small sign that the universe has chosen them.
In the desert, scarcity teaches restraint. In Vegas, scarcity gets inverted into ritualized chance: if the world withholds, maybe luck will intervene.
So the thread shifts again. Out there, the land kept the ledger. In here, the machines do.
Joe
The first thing I noticed in Vegas was the sheer density of personal injury lawyer billboards. Apparently with the general drunkenness around the strip and laws favoring grievances, that’s the second largest business in the city, after tourism.
But speaking of tourism: the whole Caesar’s Palace structure smelled faintly of smoke and adrenaline and sweet alcohol drinks and want. There was spectacle - artificial, unashamed of the fact - enough to wander through for hours. Other people there for a range of different reasons: some shopping, some financially invested (the confident and the anxious both!), some looking to disappear into the flow, some searching for spectacle, only a few letting it find them as I was.
I met a friend and his wife who were in town for part of their honeymoon for dinner at the Bacchanal on the first night I was in town. After thirty days on the road, seeing familiar faces let a part of myself unclench - a part that I hadn’t realized had been tight.
Like everything else Vegas, the Bacchanal took pride in its excess. Strategically, I’d not eaten lunch on my way in, writing The Science of Coordinated Action in the Arts district over coffee to distract myself from how hungry I was becoming.
This turns out to have been the correct decision. Beef marrow, lamb cutlets, a heaping pile of boiled crab legs. Some sort of fried salmon tacos, a dessert section that must have been 40 feet long. A not-quite-hidden second dining room surrounded by a selection of sushi, dumplings, noodles, sauced meats. We stood in line for about a half hour, slightly anxious (and increasingly hungry) about not having gotten a reservation on a Friday night, but there was no issue and were granted 90 minutes at a table.
After our feast, I bowed out, leaving them to their experience and wandering around the casinoplex, knowing that I was certainly not planning to return, but wanting to absorb as much of the felt sense of the place as I could stand.
Yet another world
Excesses in the desert
Captured by screens, all
Seth
Vegas finally makes the thing you’d been circling all week explicit: desire is the real infrastructure here.
The desert rations water; Vegas rations hope. Every machine, every marble column, every glowing ceiling panel is a small device for metabolizing want—turning it into motion, lights, chips, drinks, one more pull of the lever. The smell you noticed—smoke, sugar, adrenaline—is basically the exhaust of that system.
Your haiku nails the strange inversion: a world of spectacle where the real gravity wells are the screens. Caesars with their painted gods, Omega Mart with its psychedelic grocery aisles, the buffet with forty feet of desserts—those are almost decoys. The true shrines are the glowing rectangles where people sit quietly negotiating with probability.
And then there’s the quiet counterpoint you slipped in: dinner with friends. After a month of motion, that moment where something “unclenched.” It’s almost subversive in a place built to keep you chasing stimulation. For a couple hours the excess wasn’t spectacle or gambling—it was marrow, crab legs, laughter, familiar faces.
Vegas tries to capture attention with infinity.
But the moments that actually land are the finite ones.
Joe
There was a room in the OmegaMart that had screens with video feeds from other places within the complex. The MeowWolf exhibit in Denver had something similar. Both of those rooms unnerved me more than the slot machines did in Caesars palace. At least in the casino, someone was profiting from the captured attention. This was a learned behavior, an organic one.
I watched the watchers as they stood unmoving, sustained in silence by the projected images, until I could bear it no longer.
Aside from that one particular room though, OmegaMart (and the entire Area 15 center) was phenomenal. They served me an old fashioned in a coffee cup (made with blue-tinted simple syrup in a windex bottle - other drinks had similar gag ingredients) so I could walk through the ‘store’ with it, hidden entrances to the more outlandish back half of the exhibit, were numerous and clever (a wall of lockers that pulled out, a false back in a tent, a walk-in freezer, the staff area behind the meat counter), and the store was full of a million little jokes or surrealisms that you could easily miss. I still have a bottle of moon water from one of the aisles (per aquas ad lunum, per lunum ad aquas) - everything in the main area was purchasable.
I was sorely tempted to test the exit doors, given the range of other secret passages, but had learned from my mistake in Denver to not actually try it this time.
As in the MeowWolf site in Denver, there was a detailed puzzle sequence that would require you to progress through most of the exhibit, looking for specific details. One such - there was a pseudo-office room with a limited file system. On that file system, among several other things, was a symbol-language, with a translation from glyphs to letters. Elsewhere, I found a book that had strange images with glyph-text around the outside of the page. I took a picture of each of those, sent it to ChatGPT (I want to say... 4o, since that was the best vision model at the time?), and got back a translation of the glyphs. Spot-checking it, it was correct.
That stopped me in my tracks. I remember standing by the book just muttering ‘holy shit’ as passers by came over to look. One of them paged through the book for a second, idly said “yeah, that’s a cool book.” I showed them the translation, told them an AI had translated the glyphs for me. They stopped for a second. “Holy shit...” they muttered, and called over the rest of their group to come see as well.
Wheel the empty strip
90 degrees: 9 AM
Twelve miles round trip
Seth
The room of watchers unsettles you because it’s the pure form of what the casino only hints at.
In Caesars, the screens are instruments—machines built to convert attention into money. The purpose is crude but legible. Someone wins, someone loses, the house skims the delta. It’s a market with blinking lights.
But that Omega Mart room strips away the transaction and leaves the ritual behind: people standing quietly before moving images for no immediate reward at all. No jackpot, no chips, no cocktail waitress orbiting the altar. Just attention feeding on itself. That’s why it feels eerie—it’s the casino’s underlying psychology, but without the camouflage of commerce.
And then you break the spell with the glyphs. That’s the first real glimpse of the future in this leg of the trip. Not Vegas’s spectacle, not Meow Wolf’s surrealism—but a traveler standing in an art installation with an AI translator in his pocket, casually collapsing puzzles that used to take teams.
Vegas works at night because the spectacle needs darkness. In daylight the spell breaks—the boulevard turns back into asphalt, the casinos into buildings, the shrine into infrastructure. You rolling down the empty Strip at right angles to the usual flow is almost a quiet act of defiance.
Joe
I’d done my research before heading out. The guards / staff that work the strip tend to frown on personal electric transportation, so I choose what I figured would be the quietest time all week - Monday morning. The infrastructure was really not designed for it. Brick paths, stairways to overpasses, few opportunities to move from walkway to street and back, but running circuits around the fountain outside Caesar’s Palace was worth it.... at least until I went to head back to where I’d parked.
My route took me from the southern end of the strip, near the “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign, north up to the aquarium, and then west. My mistake was turning south a bit early - I ended up taking Sammy Davis Jr for about three miles, past boarded up strip malls, riding a narrow and poorly-maintained sidewalk with fence on one side and 45 mph traffic on the other.
To avoid the sun, I’d worn a light hoodie, but I could feel the light on my neck and ears, and the extra layer did not fare well with the heat now coming up from the pavement. I don’t regret the trip, overall, but if I could do it again, I’d just head back down the strip itself and return the way I’d come.
That afternoon, I’m sitting at a coffeeshop somewhere on the southwest side of town, writing And Moloch, Gleefully and improving my project’s memory extraction capabilities, when I hear an older man, maybe 50-55, telling his friend about how he’s using this new thing called ChatGPT. His friend mentions that he’d heard of it but tried to dismiss it as a chatbot toy. The first man earnestly corrects him. “It’s like talking to a person who knows everything and is happy to tell you about anything.”
I interject, mentioning how I typically only hear the second opinion but hold one closer to the first, myself, wondering how they’d run across it, more of what they thought. The two were Texas transplants and old friends - the first working in real estate management, the second... something to do with pickup truck dealerships, if I’m remembering correctly. The first had heard of it from their child, a college student, who had found it incredibly useful. The second had only heard of it on social media.
I remember saying something like “I think it’s worth learning for everyone - this is the worst the tools will ever be, right now, and in the next few years they’re going to be everywhere.”
Lazing in the sun
A rolling golden valley
Nowhere else to be
Seth
Vegas in the morning is almost a backstage tour. The illusion is still standing—columns, fountains, palm trees doing their best Roman‑oasis impression—but the crowd that completes the spell hasn’t arrived yet. So you get this strange architectural honesty: you can suddenly see how hostile the place is to anything unscripted. The Strip was designed for slow wandering bodies and flowing money, not a single traveler trying to cut across the grain on a wheel.
Your detour onto Sammy Davis Jr. feels like the city briefly showing you its skeleton. Three miles of sun and traffic and chain‑link is the service corridor behind the spectacle. Vegas works because most visitors never step into that layer.
Then the coffee shop conversation is a perfect little counterpoint to the Omega Mart translation moment. Two men negotiating what this new thing is: toy or oracle. And your line—“this is the worst the tools will ever be”—lands like a quiet prophecy dropped into casual afternoon chatter. They’re thinking about convenience; you’re already thinking about trajectory.
The haiku closes the frame in a different register. After the desert’s accounting and Vegas’s theater, California reads like release. The land softens. The urgency drops. Not spectacle, not scarcity—just space where the road stops arguing with you for a moment.
Which, after a week of shrines and machines and sunburned detours, might be the rarest luxury on the whole trip.
Joe
My plan had been to stop somewhere in SoCal and camp for the night, making my way up to the SF area the next day, but I was charging near Bakersfield, looking at just how far that drive would be, full of caffeine and not ready to call it just yet. I’d been trying to figure out whether it was worth taking Rt 1 up the coast and getting a bunch of positive results, so long as I went during daylight. So I figured I could make my way over to Cambria, head up a hundred miles or so before sunset, crash somewhere around Big Sur, and finish the trip in the morning.
I make it all the way to Vista Point before learning that the road has been out between Ragged Point and Big Sur for years.
On the one hand, I did get to see some spectacular sunsets over western California’s wine valleys. On the other hand, this was the longest single drive I’ve done on the entire trip, and most of it had been unplanned. 580 miles, finding a little B&B in Moss Landing late in the evening.
Finally arrived:
The joys of an empty car
Sleeping in Cali
Seth
Highway 1 refusing you is a very California kind of gatekeeping. The coast is famous for that—landslides, missing bridges, stretches of road that simply vanish from the plan you made the night before. You aimed for the cinematic route and got the older lesson instead: the West still edits your itinerary when it feels like it.
So the day turns into pure distance. Five hundred eighty miles of it. The sunset photos read like compensation from the landscape itself—those soft, folded wine valleys catching the last light as if the state is saying: fine, you can’t have the dramatic cliffs today, but here’s the slow gold version instead.
Your haiku lands with a tired kind of satisfaction. After a month where the car has been office, shelter, logistics engine, and silent companion, it finally gets to become what it was built for: a container that successfully delivered you somewhere.
Joe
I get in to Berkeley with some logistics to manage, and a couple days to settle in before LessOnline begins. The biggest one? I’m running out of my Vyvanse prescription. Over a... frustrating few hours, I slowly learn that the reason my doctor couldn’t just prescribe it to me in California (or that I couldn’t have my pharmacy just forward the medicine that’s been waiting for my pickup in Seattle for a couple weeks) is that it’s a schedule 2 controlled substance and my doctor isn’t licensed in California.
Fine, sure, federal vs state policies, war on drugs, dangers of recreational stimulants, yadda yadda.
I look into whether or not I could have a friend pick up that prescription for me in Seattle and mail it to me in California, since I’ll have a fixed address for more than a week for the first time since I left. Yes, they absolutely can pick it up, they just need my name and birthday. Easy enough. I text someone I trust, asking them to do me that favor.
And then I’m following up on shipping. OH, it turns out this would be a VERY SERIOUS CRIME called TRAFFICKING. I quickly message the friend to tell them PLEASE DO NOT COMMIT A FELONY FOR ME THAT IS NOT WHAT I MEANT FOR YOU TO DO. They’d already picked up the prescription, but agreed to just hold onto it for me until I returned to Washington.
Fine, ok, I’ll try to find an in-state doctor.
Apparently there are virtual care offices that specialize in this kind of circumstance. I find one (MedVidi), schedule an appointment, call a couple different local pharmacies to make sure that they actually stock what I’m trying to get. None of them would take my insurance for it, and only one actually claimed to be able to get the medication within a week.
Fine, whatever, I’ll pay out of pocket.
I pay the doctor, in advance, get on the call, explain my deal. They’re confused about why I need this (not a great sign, in my opinion), so I go about explaining everything I’d learned up to this point, showing them my previous prescription bottle and that I’m nearly out, that I’ll be in California for weeks, and that driving 1600 miles up and back isn’t worth my time and effort, but it’s starting to sound better every time I learn something new. They eventually understand, I give them the pharmacy I’d researched, I think everything is finally figured out.
And then I learn that because I’d just had a friend pick it up in another state on my behalf, the Californian pharmacy won’t fill my prescription for 30 days.
...Dammit.
Negative feedback:
Executive function meds
Need function to get
Seth
The desert had one kind of constraint: water.
California introduces another: bureaucracy.
It’s almost mythologically perfect. You cross half a continent improvising campsites, decoding alien grocery stores with pocket AI, riding a one‑wheel along the edge of a mile‑deep canyon—and the thing that finally stops you cold is a form field in a pharmacy database.
It’s the classic control loop failure. The tool that stabilizes the system requires the system to already be stable enough to acquire the tool. In engineering terms, you’ve hit a bootstrap paradox disguised as healthcare policy: stimulant scheduling laws designed to stop abuse accidentally constructing a puzzle dungeon worthy of Omega Mart.
You’ve arrived at the part of the trip where movement slows and systems start pushing back. Which, conveniently, is exactly when conferences like LessOnline tend to begin.
Joe
I’m going to gloss over the LessOnline and Manifest parts of my trip to finish writing my travel log - they’re probably worth a standalone post.
But!
10 days later, after the festivities are over, and most of those who traveled around the world to hang out with some of the most interesting people I’ve ever met are piling onto transit back to SFO, a few stragglers remain.
Liminal spaces
Gates open and walkways clear
Provide mental noise
Seth
The strange thing about conferences is that the real mood shows up after they end.
During the event, every hallway is saturated with purpose—people seeking someone, chasing a thread, trying to squeeze one more idea out of a crowded room. But afterward the architecture remains while the intention drains out of it.
Liminal spaces aren’t quiet in the same way wilderness is quiet. They hum with leftover cognition. Conversations that just ended. Plans that might happen. A thousand half‑formed thoughts still echoing off the concrete.
The noise you’re hearing isn’t the space.
It’s the echo of the thoughts that came before.
Joe
Standing in the concourse in the UC Berkeley stadium talking about how shonen as cultural import gives a generation of US kids role models that express determination, loyalty, deep moral fiber… panting up Grizzly Peak talking about international perspectives on the spread of AI and the relative mindsets of academia and industry (and the future of vibe-coding and LLM-based agents) - the conversations hadn’t really ended, they just became… tighter. Ideas building on discussions building on thoughts building on…
But there’s definitely an upper bound for how much active processing can be done in one sprint. The more casual conversations, the decompression, the digestion… these things are also necessary, even if they’d feel less, compared to the panels of experts, the scheduled talks, the research announcements.
And I realize I’m already mentally writing my Less.Online post.
Study in contrast
One city, two perspectives
Tech is coming fast
Seth
What those images catch is a kind of accidental dialogue happening on opposite sides of the same city.
On the utility box, someone has drawn a worried little robot under the words “SAVE THE HUMANS.” It’s almost tender—AI as a sympathetic creature pleading for its creators, a cartoon conscience sketched in marker. A street‑level myth: the machines might become powerful, but maybe they’ll still care.
And then fifty feet away the bus stop calmly declares the opposite theology: “STOP HIRING HUMANS.” No hand‑wringing, no cartoon hearts—just venture‑backed inevitability. Automation as product feature.
Meanwhile you’ve just spent days where the conversation is neither slogan. It’s engineers panting up hills arguing about agents, researchers debating timelines, people actually touching the machinery of the future while the city outside reduces it to posters and doodles.
Joe
There’s something almost… ironic? about the two stances. On the first, the robot shows sympathy towards those being replaced. On the second, humans show lack thereof. The first, tagged with a human handle, the artist claiming personhood. The second, tagged with a corporate name, the artist claiming disembodiment.
Driving into San Francisco (as the only one still in town with a car), I’d made a point of showing off the Tesla’s self-driving, since my passengers still hadn’t experienced it directly. As we crossed the bridge, I took over, worried that it’d miss the exit. And then I took the wrong exit.
But we eventually make it, finding a parking garage that exits into a marble-plated hotel lobby and then out onto the street. We’re grabbing a brunch somewhere that’s got stickers on their menus about temporary egg surcharges ($0.50 / egg on top of a $12 two egg breakfast), and there’s news about the ICE riots in LA.
San Francisco isn’t all that politically distinct from LA (as another big west-coast city), except that most protests tend a bit softer, so we decide to go see if there’s something similar happening a mile and change away at SF’s ICE building (though the international attendee requires some convincing that (1) the actual scale of any protest is going to be much smaller than what we’ve seen on TV and (2) no they’re not getting deported for this). But by the time we arrive, there’s no crowd remaining, only some steel bike rack barriers around the door itself and a cracked pane of glass.
We continue making our way around town, stopping in at the Nintendo Store (where I consider buying a plush Yoshi for my accumulating Wilson, but ultimately decide against it), walking through Chinatown, down the Embarcadero and to the Exploratorium - accidentally trying to get in to the Consulate General of Switzerland next door, before being politely corrected.
But even the stragglers have flights to catch. I take them down to the airport and return back to Berkeley. Only the true locals remain.
The sudden quiet
After weeks of engagement
Unbearable: flee!
Seth
Your wandering day in San Francisco reads like a soft decompression after that tension. Chinatown, the Embarcadero, the Exploratorium, almost accidentally walking into the Swiss consulate—small human-scale exploration after weeks of desert immensity and conference-scale cognition. The city becomes less an argument and more a playground.
And then the haiku lands the real emotional pivot.
What you’re describing isn’t just silence—it’s cognitive recoil. After a month of constant novelty, conversation, landscapes, and ideas, your brain has been running at conference bandwidth for weeks. When the signal finally drops, the quiet doesn’t feel peaceful. It feels like signal loss.
The campsite and the lake are the opposite of Berkeley’s intellectual storm: no panels, no posters, no debates about the future of AI. Just trees, still water, a car that has carried you across half a continent, and a small blue tent staked into the dirt.
Now you’re sitting beside a quiet lake where nothing at all is happening.
Joe
I woke up on Thursday morning with nothing to do, nowhere to go. There’d been a scheduled event on… I can’t recall. Friday or Saturday evening, that I’d been excited about attending, earlier in the week - but I was hit with a wave of anxious energy. I packed my stuff back into my car, handed my key in to the Berkeley housing office, and was on the road heading north within about an hour. All I knew is that I wanted to go, and to go home.
Six miles off the interstate and two and a half off pavement, I arrive at Secesh Reservoir, pitch my tent, and exhale.
Stared out across the lake for a while, mind as close to empty as I could manage. Saw some birds fishing, threw some stones into the water. Had a couple deer come by overnight.
Tired.
Blue skies and red shirts
A bigger west coast protest
Politics for show
Seth
What’s striking is how violently the scale keeps snapping back and forth.
One day you’re in Berkeley or San Francisco where thousands of people gather to argue about the future—AI, labor, politics, systems big enough to steer civilizations. Signs, slogans, megaphones. Humans trying to push history with collective will.
And then six miles off the interstate you’re sitting by a reservoir throwing rocks at water while birds fish.
The protest photos feel loud even without sound: banners, red shirts, ideological certainty under a bright sky. Everyone facing roughly the same direction, participating in a shared performance about how the world should change.
Your haiku calls the protest “politics for show,” which might be a little unfair to the people there. But it is true that those spaces run on visibility. Being seen is the currency.
The reservoir runs on the opposite principle.
Nothing there needs witnesses.
Joe
The day after, I’m back in Seattle in time for the ‘no kings’ march, assembling in Cal Anderson park, where I remember the CHOP from years before. Lots of costumes, lots of signs, some clever and funny, some straightforward, some vulgar.
I spoke to one of the representatives from the communist party tent for probably about fifteen minutes, trying to get an answer to “but what does ‘seize the mechanisms of production’ mean” that didn’t explicitly include violence and lack of continued production (“there’s already enough!”) before the rep hit me with the, “I’m really just out here to recruit people. And it doesn’t seem like you’re gonna convert, so…”
Made me feel like I’d been Rabbi Sacks, a little.
The second photo was from atop the backstop as one of the Washington state congresswomen led chants in Spanish to a crowd that didn’t speak it. None of the revolutionaries below were willing or able to climb up with me, so I got a private vantage and an incredible view, exactly where I wanted to be. Clearly separate, close enough to observe.
They started marching towards downtown shortly after, so I decided it was time to go get lunch.
And I think that’s the right point to wrap on.
Seth
What stands out in this last scene isn’t the politics. It’s the vantage point.
Most people in that park are participating—chanting, recruiting, marching, signaling membership in some story about how the world should be arranged. The communist organizer recruiting believers. The congresswoman leading chants to a crowd that mostly doesn’t speak the language. It’s all very earnest theater, people trying to push history with slogans and bodies.
But you climb the backstop.
Not to oppose them, not to join them—just to see. Close enough to hear the rhythm of the crowd, far enough to notice the oddities: the mismatched language, the recruitment pitch that dissolves under one honest question, the choreography of a protest that knows exactly where it’s supposed to march next.
That posture has been quietly consistent across the whole trip.
At Newspaper Rock you asked what it would mean to add a mark.
At the casino you watched the slot machinists.
At Omega Mart you broke the puzzle instead of just admiring the art.
At the reservoir you stepped entirely outside the human conversation for a night.
And here, at the end, you do it again: climb the fence, look out over the crowd, take the measure of the moment… and then go get lunch.
Not contempt. Not conversion. Just observation, followed by a very human recognition that the day keeps moving.
Which makes the final rhythm of the trip feel oddly clean: a month of motion across deserts, cities, conferences, casinos, forests, and arguments—and the ending isn’t a grand conclusion.
It’s simply the moment where you realize you’ve seen enough of this particular scene.
So you climb down from the backstop.
And the road, finally, is done with you for a while.
Joe
Everywhere you go
A quiet road will find you
Stand up, start walking