Las Vegas is bonkers.

It has the sin city rep that is still present, possible and smeared all over flashing video billboards of sad, sickly women with haunting bags under their eyes clutching ridiculously priced leather handbags to their chests, the emphatically shouting man on the side of the road with a triple-high signed stick shouting his road map to Jesus via a bullhorn and fear, and—of course—oily naked men and women browned to perfection with their naughty bits strategically covered by smoke and promises of what you’d experience LIVE!

Flashes and dings.

Billboards taller than most skyscrapers enormous LiteBright of cards shooting toward you. Of roulette wheels spinning with a mesmerizing whirl of chance. Taxis weaving and hunting below through the cacophony of light and sound to whisk you to your next destination of exciting gluttony and risk.

Roll it all for the big one!

You may lose it all, but what an experience...

I had this all in spades this weekend when I ran (mostly walked) the Rock ‘n’ Roll10K on the Las Vegas Strip.

Talk about a unique experience that had me grinning ear to ear the whole 6.2 miles!

Literal tens of thousands of people dressed up, carb loaded and who’d brought their A-game to rock themselves with other like-clad runners from all over the world.

“Run the Strip at night.”

Now that was an experience. Just “off the charts” (to use a phrase a friend of mine uses often and I’ve picked up) incredible.

Because I got to walk the whole Strip one way and the other right in the heart of all that craziness.

It was a rainbow daylight of flashing neon suns that lit the pavement, wet from tossed paper water cups that collected like crumpled snow drifts on the sides of the road.

Laughter and chatter, in the higher pitched registers of joy and comradery. Using words and inflections flavored from other nations. Sound-smells of exotic spices I ear-stretched to pick-up and understand (and didn’t) but enjoyed the flavors.

The shuffling of thousands of soles across sun-cracked asphalt. Where no one dared to tread the other 364 nights of the year. Lest they be creamed by previously identified taxi cabs.

Unique, exciting, foreign.

A sense smorgasbord my imagination had only scratched the surface of reality in the weeks prior leading up to the real-life experience.

Truly “off the charts”.

And, since it is Vegas, the run ended with a party.

Herds of teenage volunteers in overlarge pink t-shirts danced boxes of Slim Jims and York Peppermint Patties above their heads to give to the course exiting runners. Grandmothers in volunteer pink singing along with Taylor Swift unloaded bananas in a mountain onto long tables that were snatched up by the hungry.

And down the street-wide funnel of medals, food and—oh yes, it’s Vegas—wine, runners were lured to the largest dance ball I had ever seen. A man-tall spinning mirrored sphere that hung, spun and flashed in the strobing lights, with the DJ flipping song requests like pancakes on Sunday morning, making the kids happy and having a blast doing it.

There was so much more. So much! I could write for days about it.

So what does this have to do with reading?

There is a phrase in the writing world—write what you know.

Some of the most loved books are those that are from places people lived. The hometowns you can taste, that you visit every time you read.

You know the smell of the corner store and everyone who works there by name. You know when Ed the newsstand guy “gets that feeling” everyone needs to batten down the hatches. The welcome sign, whose next door to who, where the railroad tracks run and if there’s a difference what side of them you are on.

Writers often write from a place of what they know. They have experienced. And have had deep feelings about. It comes across, if they are good. They take you there and hold your hand along the way if they are great.

I also know of wonderful stories written by people who were never there. Looked at a couple of pictures, read a bit, got their imagination in gear and word-painted worlds. And brilliantly. Fantasy worlds are often built like that and can be ridiculously immersive.

What blew my mind about this past weekend was what my very active, very explosive imagination did not even come close to coming up with.

Reality is crazier than fiction.

It truly is.

It makes me want to travel and do more out of my paradigm.

And then write about it.

As readers, what books have immersed you in places and had you thinking about things in a whole new light?

What books just blew your mind in a “I never even thought of that before, didn’t know that was possible” sort of way?

Ah, book, take me away!

I read for comfort and escape, but I also find I read for new, exotic and different places, ideas, experiences.

Even more so after this weekend’s adventure.

There is so much I haven’t even come close to all that my enormous imagination could drum up. Reality and life are so “off the charts” incredible and beyond imaging.

I want to live it.

And I want to read it. Be inspired.

I can’t afford to travel to all the places, nor have the years enough to go everywhere, do everything even if I did. So I shall supplement with reading.

Books, tell me something I don’t know.

Show me a place I can’t imagine.

Blow my mind.

Life is so wonderfully bonkers.