SHOT Show Day 4 - Weird Is Merely Normal in Vegas

This will be our final update from Las Vegas

Today is the final day of the Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show. Thankfully, thousands of tired, sore, hung-over delegates can make the trek home from another show.

Yesterday was busy. After a morning spent working in a booth for a manufacturer with whom we have a professional relationship, it was time to head out into the wilderness of the show and commit acts of journalism.

The most interesting find of the day was the Cauldryn Fyre mobile water bottle. This is device is a stainless steel water bottle that can boil water or heat beverages using an integrated battery pack or 12 volt adapter. Once hot, the device can keep water at a user-selectable temperature for over 10 hours.

They also offer a blender so those back-country frozen margaritas are much easier.

We must conclude this field communique quickly as the maids are banging on the hotel door and demanding we vacate the premises but we need to discuss our brief journey to the downtown “Old Vegas” Fremont Street Experience.

We spend one evening every year taking in the sights, sounds and, especially, smells of this world-famous destination and with all confidence, I must say that things are getting weirder and weirder.

With several sources of loud, pumping music from DJ’s and live bands, the noise level is deafening and entirely confused echoing among the buildings on either side. As an aficionado who loves loud music (I survived a Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels concert), it pains me to say the muddy cacophony was almost intolerable.

But it is the people that make Fremont Street so weird. Aside from standard-issue tourists of every stripe, you throw in hustlers, street performers of countless variety (mostly semi-naked to various degrees), show girls, drunks and two very nonplussed gun writers, I told my buddy that it was conclusive: we had stumbled upon the fourth level of Hell.

In a few blocks, we saw: a topless nun, a man wearing only an adult diaper, another “street performer” who would allow you to kick him between the legs for $10 and two buff male dancers performing an act on a grandmother that was likely illegal and definitely unhealthy.

On the other hand, grandma was smiling from ear-to-ear.

Viva Las Vegas!