We visited Henderson this weekend. The primary purpose was to visit the Kwik E Mart, but while there, we decided to drop by the exalted Green Valley Ranch and the adjacent “The District” which we have heard raves about for quite some time.

The first thing I noticed when I pulled into the parking garage was that the GVR garage has a really spectacular view of the Las Vegas Valley. Naturally, I pulled out my pocket camera and started taking some shots. I took like, 50 shots. Here is one of them:

Las Vegas Skyline pictures? Whoa … that is top-secret evildoer stuff! Who would want pictures of the Vegas skyline unless they were up to no good!!

You know what happened next, right? Yep … some Poindexter with a yellow shirt on a bicycle with “Security” emblazoned across it quickly rode up, parked his bike about 10 feet to my right, and stared at me. I took my time adjusting settings and spent about ten minutes framing just the right shots, and the guy stood there and stared at me the whole time. Were people being mugged in the parking lot? Were cars being stolen? Did someone need medical attention? Who knows … (in)security was busy watching me take wide angle shots of the Vegas Strip which was 15 miles away.

Feel safer?

The guy never said a word to me, so I have no idea how he “secured” anything. He just made it obvious that he was staring. Ooooh, dude on a bicycle in a yellow shirt is staring at me … ooooooh. I think that I was officially supposed to be intimidated, but I was just completely amused.

He was visibly annoyed that I was unimpressed by his little dramatics, and rode beside me and glared at me as we strolled to the elevator, glared at me when I went back to the car, and even made it a point to ride up and glare at me when we were leaving the parking garage while in the car.

He was determined to elicit a response, but we all just laughed every time he did the “Look at me glare at you” thing. The dude was bored. And who could blame him. He was “security” at a place where nothing happens.

Once inside GVR, it looked exactly like Boulder Station. Movie theaters, food court, restaurants, gaming machines, nice pool. Nice, but nothing really worthy of a trip off of The Strip. Visually, it is a couple notches below Red Rock Station in my opinion.

Don’t get me wrong. It is a fine casino, and if I had the misfortune of living in Henderson, I would have no qualms about frequenting the place. It’s clean, has decent Station Casino odds, has the Boarding Pass program, and has a large selection of places to eat from high-end to fast-food, has a wide variety of games for high and low rollers, and has a very attractive poker room. It is a very, very nice locals casino.

The waitresses are dressed far too conservatively, and seemed to be of the “chubby disgruntled local” variety, but this is standard for Station casinos. I wish they would take a cue from Coast casinos and put Playboy-quality thong-wearing waitresses in locals joints (oh how I miss the boner-inducing Suncoast waitresses) … but I guess you can’t have everything.

After hanging around GVR for awhile, we headed across the street to the much-hyped “District”.

And this is where hilarity ensued.

What … the … fuck … is … this …place ??!!

First of all, they can’t spell worth a shit.

Hey, Henderson people … It’s spelled “Anthropology”.

Idiots.

Anyway …

We walked on to what looked like a movie backlot. They built a fake “city”, put fake “urban decor” on the buildings, and put stores and condos in these buildings.

But that’s not the funny part.

The funny part is that the people who were roaming around this place genuinely seemed to think it was real. This was not a tongue-in-cheek, gaudy-fake “city” like at NYNY or Paris. This was a genuine effort to create a “city”, a mere one block from the freeway in Henderson.

Holy fucking shit if I have ever felt like I was in the Twilight Zone, it was at “The District”.

It wasn’t just the ridiculous phony facade, but it was the people. Oh my goodness the people. Until this trip to The District, it had been 20 years since I had seen a bona-fide “yuppie”. The District breaks the space-time continuum. The only people at this place were 1985-ish yuppies.

Women with cardigan sweaters around their waist / over their shoulders, men with their collars upturned wearing socks with flip flops …. these people were completely serious.

How do I know they were serious?

Because we have never been stared at before like we were stared at in this place. Yappy women would walk out of misspelled stores, pause, stare at our faces, look down to our shoes, look back up, and then walk on while whispering to each other. I am serious, we got the overtly-obvious “look up and down” thing from several Buffys and Muffys.

We were GEICO cavemen. From the stares we got, you would have thought that I had three heads growing out of my neck. I really felt as if these people had only seen people like us on TV, and were shocked to see that we existed in real life. Kind of like ET, the Extra-Terrestrial.

I have chin-length hair, usually wear worn jeans with old t-shirts, and look like Eddie Vedder’s less hygienic cousin. My kids model the latest fashions from the 99 cent store, and think K-Mart is the place you shop when you win the lottery. I could not even fathom a guess at the brand of shoes I am currently wearing. There is no name on them. They just look “shoe-like”, and that is good enough for me.

However … Buffy, Biff, Shitly, Kaitlyn, Bratford, Kaitlynne, Dakota, Kaitlin, Maddox, Katelyn, Tyler, Kaitlinne, Madison, and Kaitlyn Jr. clearly disapproved that we had taken a monster piss in their bizarre self-created gene pool.

Now I know how black people in Iowa feel.

So we strolled around for a bit … past the “urban” Sharper Image, past the “urban” Gymboree, past the “urban” sidewalk cafes … but every minute that passed made the gag reflex harder to suppress.

Nobody that has ever actually lived in a city, would be caught dead at this thing. At least not without laughing their gonads off. This should be the slogan for The District: “The city for the people who have never lived in a city, never been to a city, and never plan on going to a city”.

I kept waiting for someone to come out and yell “Surprise, you’re on Candid Camera!”, but alas, these people took their “District” seriously. They were hardcore Upper West Side city dwellers dammit, and you could not convince them otherwise. Actually, they were hipper and cooler city dwellers because they had Humvees in the parking lot.

Damn the “A” train and the panhandlers that come with it, these people had Hummers. As a matter of fact, I have never seen so many Hummers and massive SUVs in one place, as I saw in the parking lot of The District.

15 minutes and 100 disapproving stares later, we left “the city”.

Will I ever go back? Only if carjacked, but if the thief directed me to drive to The District, I will implore him to just go ahead and shoot me.

The District does have some entertainment value in that it is laughably absurd and ridiculous beyond the comprehension of most humans, but after a few minutes you just want to get out of there before you lose touch with reality like the rest of the people who inhabit the place.

We hopped in the car, got the evil monkey stare from bored security biker, headed north, pulled off the freeway, drove past the groups of dealers, past the two-tone cars without hubcaps, past the crazy magazine rack shouting guy, past the aging hooker in the parking lot … securely back in our element among the riff-raff. We went upstairs and opened the drapes just in time to see the Bellagio Fountains finish a show with a couple of high blasts.

It was good to be home.