Travel on Aldrin Jenson

A solo weekend in New Orleans

aldrinjenson@gmail.com (Aldrin Jenson) — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 02:00:00 -0400

Trip: New Orleans, Louisiana · June 19–21, 2026 · solo · one backpack

New Orleans had been on my list for a while. It’s one of those American places that feels like its own country — French, Spanish, Caribbean and Southern all layered on top of each other — and I wanted to see it before I run out of weekends in the US. So I booked a flight, packed a single backpack, and went alone for three days.

This is how it went, what I ate, and the things I learned along the way — including a museum that I went in expecting to tick off a box and came out of genuinely moved.

A mule-drawn carriage near Jackson Square — the first thing that hits you about New Orleans is that it doesn’t feel like the rest of America.

First impressions: a wall of humidity

I almost missed my flight (a story for another day), but I made it, and by early afternoon I was walking from my hotel toward the French Quarter. The first thing New Orleans gives you in June is the humidity. I was sweating within minutes of stepping outside — it was somewhere around a 110°F “feels-like” with a heat advisory in effect. The first thing I bought in the city was a straw hat.

The Quarter itself is wonderful to walk through. It reminded me, oddly, a little of Bangalore at first, and then it settled into something more Caribbean — colour everywhere, wrought-iron balconies, people out eating and laughing and putting on a show. It’s a place that wears its character openly. Bordering the Quarter is Canal Street, the wide downtown boulevard, where I was amused to spot a Caesars casino — the same brand I’d walked past in Las Vegas only the month before.

I stayed in the Arts / Warehouse District, a short walk from the Quarter and, as it happened, right near the museum that would become the highlight of the trip.

Friday — the French Quarter

I’d booked a walking history tour of the French Quarter for the afternoon. Honest take: it was a bit long (about two and a quarter hours) and very heavy on theory — and I made the rookie mistake of trying to power through on nothing but protein bars, so by the end I was fading. But the history stuck, and it’s the kind of history that reframes the whole city:

New Orleans passed through three hands — French, then Spanish, then American (after a treaty) — and you can read that in the architecture. The buildings look French, but many are actually built in the Spanish style that went up after the great fires.
Sicilian Italians came later, for work.
The land was reclaimed swampland, made valuable by all the sediment the Mississippi River dumps here. At one point this was one of the richest places in the country.
And the fact I keep repeating to people: the city is not named after Orléans in France — it’s named after the Duke of Orléans, the regent for the boy-king Louis XV. (Napoleon turns up in the story too.)

St. Louis Cathedral, framed by Jackson Square and the Andrew Jackson statue. It was closed by the time my tour finished on Friday — I’d have to come back for it.

For lunch (well, late lunch) I ate at Napoleon House, a roughly 200-year-old landmark, where I had Creole jambalaya. More on the food below — there’s a lot of it.

Preservation Hall

The evening was the surprise of the day. I went to a set at Preservation Hall — $28 for a standing ticket, about 45 minutes — with basically no idea what to expect. I’m not someone who knows jazz. But it was wonderful. At one point I closed my eyes and just listened to the instruments chime in one by one: a big upright bass, a keyboard, and three wind instruments — clarinet, trombone, and one more — carrying the melody between them. Totally worth it. (I had no cash on me to tip the band that night — so I came back on Sunday, when I had some, and dropped a bit in.)

Outside Preservation Hall before the set — an unassuming, beautifully worn old building.

A packed house at Preservation Hall — standing room only, in a beautifully worn old room. I went in not knowing what to feel and came out a believer.

Afterwards I walked Bourbon Street in a light rain — costumes, street performers, a kind of permanent carnival energy that reminded me a little of Times Square. I capped the night with gumbo and a chicory coffee.

Saturday morning — into the swamp

Saturday I went out on a swamp and bayou boat tour — a covered pontoon boat (not an airboat), with a hotel pickup around 8 AM, out to the Barataria / Jean Lafitte wetlands south of the city. We saw alligators, glided through the bayou, and the guide turned out to be a great source of facts that I’ve been hoarding ever since:

A bayou is a slow-moving body of water whose water can flow in both directions — unlike a normal river or canal, which always runs from high ground to low.
Spanish moss is one of the great misnomers: it’s not a moss, not a parasite, and not from Spain. It’s a silvery plant that, during the Great Depression, was harvested as a cheap substitute for cotton to stuff cushions and pillows — and gave a lot of people work.
Cypress trees here can grow as large and as useful as redwoods.
Marsh vs. swamp: a swamp is forested; a marsh is treeless, floating vegetation.
On the wildlife: everything we saw was alligators, not crocodiles. Alligators are relatively lazy, docile, nocturnal predators — they mostly take prey smaller than themselves and only go after a human by mistake (a squatting person or a kid slapping the water can read as “small prey”). Their teeth don’t even touch when their mouths close. Crocodiles are the aggressive ones.
A genuinely odd fact: Louisiana — and New Orleans especially — is one of the only places you can privately own a body of water. You can’t feed gators in public waters, but in private waters the rules are looser, which is why the guides can lure them with marshmallows.

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One of the locals, swimming right up to our boat. Alligators are surprisingly docile — they mostly ignore you.

Saturday afternoon — the National WWII Museum

This was the best thing I did all weekend, and the thing I’d most recommend to anyone visiting New Orleans.

I’ll be honest about why it landed so hard. One of my long-standing weaknesses is history and geography — I’d pick up scattered facts in small museums and never had a frame to hang them on. The National WWII Museum gave me that frame. I did the guided tour plus their signature cinematic film, “Beyond All Boundaries,” narrated by Tom Hanks. It’s not cheap (around $76 all-in), but it’s worth every dollar.

The National WWII Museum. I came in expecting to tick a box and left wanting to learn for months.

For the first time, the whole war clicked into a timeline instead of a pile of disconnected facts. A few things that crystallised:

The war “ends” in 1945, but the trouble really starts in 1919, with the Treaty of Versailles. After that comes the Great Depression, and roughly a decade later the war proper.
Two forces expanding at the same time — Nazi Germany in Europe and Japan in the Pacific — eventually threatening both Europe and America, until Pearl Harbor pulled the US fully in. (I’ll admit it: before this trip I didn’t even know where Pearl Harbor was.)
What stayed with me most was the sheer resilience and coordination — building weapons and ammunition at scale, organising across an entire society without any of the communication tools we take for granted, and a country that was deeply divided by race and class at home pulling together for the war effort. It left me with a real respect for what was achieved.

It also left me with a pile of questions I’m still chasing — what was Italy’s stake in joining the Axis? What was Russia’s role, and why did Hitler march on Moscow? I walked out wanting to learn the map of the world properly and to memorise a few anchor dates so the next thing I read has somewhere to attach. The single biggest realisation: most of my confusion about history came simply from not knowing where countries are and not having a timeline. Fix those two and everything else has a place to hang.

And there was a nice little connection on the way out: the Spanish moss I’d learned about that very morning became popular during the Great Depression — which I now knew sat before the Second World War. Two facts from two completely different tours, suddenly linked. That’s the feeling I travel for.

Dinner at Cochon

I had dinner at Cochon, chef Donald Link’s Cajun restaurant near the museum. It was a bit of a splurge (around $42 with tip) and worth it — proper South Louisiana cuisine: fried alligator, wood-fired oysters, and the namesake cochon — slow-cooked pork with cracklins.

Dinner at Cochon — fried alligator, wood-fired oysters, and the pork dish the place is named for.

Sunday — a slow goodbye

My last morning was deliberately unhurried. I left the hotel late, wandered back into the French Quarter, and finally got inside St. Louis Cathedral — this time for the 11 AM Mass, which felt like the right way to close the loop after finding it shut on Friday.

Inside St. Louis Cathedral during Sunday Mass. The flags down the nave represent the nations whose flags once flew over New Orleans — France, Spain, Britain and the US among them.

Then the part of the day I’d most been looking forward to: breakfast at Café du Monde. I’d actually tried to go on Friday and been defeated by not carrying cash (a recurring theme — more on that below), but the main Jackson Square stand runs basically around the clock, so I came back for it. Beignets and a café au lait — powdered sugar everywhere, exactly as advertised. They were fine, honestly — pleasant rather than mind-blowing — but it’s one of those things you do for the ritual as much as the pastry. I wandered the French Market alongside it.

Café du Monde beignets and a café au lait. Bring cash.

To get out to the Garden District, I took the St. Charles Avenue streetcar — one of the oldest continuously operating streetcars in the world, an olive-green wooden car that rattles down a track shaded by enormous oaks. It’s a lovely, slow way to watch the city change from the dense Quarter to wide avenues and grand houses. Out there I joined a pay-what-you-wish walking tour of the Garden District (I caught it about halfway through, gave $15), had a mocktail at a café, and then headed for the airport.

The St. Charles streetcar out to the Garden District — my favourite way to move around the city.

The Garden District — enormous live oaks arching over quiet streets of grand old houses. A completely different New Orleans from the French Quarter.

Music everywhere

If there’s one thing that defines New Orleans more than the food or the history, it’s the music. It isn’t confined to venues — it’s the city’s baseline hum. Beyond Preservation Hall, live jazz pours out of the bars all down Bourbon Street and Royal Street, and street musicians set up on corners with a trumpet, a clarinet, a sousaphone and a bucket for tips. You genuinely can’t walk far without running into a band. It’s the most musical place I’ve ever been.

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Street jazz in the French Quarter — this kind of thing is happening on half the corners.

By the river

It was down on the bank of the Mississippi that I came across the Monument to the Immigrant — a white marble statue of a family stepping off the boat, dedicated in 1995 by the Italian American Marching Club. It stuck with me more than I expected.

The Monument to the Immigrant, on the bank of the Mississippi.

It got me thinking about how much of America is a story of people arriving from somewhere else — though it’s worth being precise about who. The French and Spanish who founded and ruled New Orleans in the 1700s were really colonists, establishing colonial rule rather than immigrating to a country that already existed. Much of the city was then physically built by enslaved Africans, brought here by force — not immigrants in any sense, but central to what the place became. It was only later, in the 1800s, that the genuine waves of immigrants — Sicilian Italians, Irish, Germans — arrived through the port to settle and work. That last wave is what the Monument to the Immigrant honours, and it’s what rhymed with two places I’d visited recently back in New York: the Museum at Eldridge Street, a beautifully restored synagogue that tells the story of Jewish immigration, and the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side, where Italian and Jewish families were packed into a single building. Different city, same story of arrival.

The river itself is worth a pause. The Mississippi is a mighty thing to stand beside, even if it’s not the cleanest water you’ll ever see — one of my guides told me flatly that you can’t swim in it. He talked about the city’s endless fight with water: New Orleans sits low and floods easily, so the river is held back by levees (the raised embankments built up along the banks), and about Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when those defences failed and much of the city went under. It’s a reminder that this lovely place lives in a slightly precarious truce with the water around it.

The food

New Orleans food deserves its own section. Over three days I worked my way through most of the classics:

Jambalaya — a rice dish with meat cooked in; mine was Creole-style at Napoleon House. Hearty, a little sweet.
Muffuletta — the famous New Orleans sandwich, stacked with cured meats, cheese and an olive salad. I had mine at Café Beignet on Canal Street.
Gumbo — a thick stew over rice; I had a bowl with a chicory coffee.
Fried alligator — yes, really, at Cochon. Tastes a bit like firm chicken.
Wood-fired oysters — also at Cochon, smoky and rich.
Cochon — the slow-cooked pork dish the restaurant is named after, with cracklins.
Beignets and café au lait at Café du Monde — the iconic finale. I’ll be honest: the beignets were okay, pleasant rather than a revelation. The ritual is half the point.
Chicory coffee — the local style, coffee cut with roasted chicory root; worth trying at least once.

Jambalaya, served as three rice scoops with bread and butter. There’s a reason people come to New Orleans just to eat.

What I made of it

Honestly, it was a good trip and I’m glad I went. It was humid, and I walked a lot — but walking is the way to see the place. The city is walkable enough, and the public transport (the streetcars especially) is good; the only time I needed an Uber the whole weekend was to and from the airport.

The people were what I remember most. Every guide I had — the French Quarter history walk, the Garden District tour, the swamp tour — was warm and genuinely good company. That’s not a given, and it coloured the whole trip.

On cost: it was a little cheaper than New York, but not by as much as I’d expected. I’d assumed a Southern city would be a fair bit easier on the wallet, and it was only marginally so. Still, the things worth doing were worth the money. If I were advising someone, I’d say skip the big riverboat cruise and do the swamp tour instead, and spend an evening at Preservation Hall for the jazz — those were the right calls. And just sitting by the water for a while was lovely in its own quiet way.

The best thing, by some distance, was the National WWII Museum. I came away having genuinely learned — about the war, and about the French and Spanish layers of the city’s own history. That’s exactly what I want from travel: to come home knowing more than I did, and to have it stick.

It’s been a memorable trip. I’m really glad I went.

Practical notes

For anyone planning their own New Orleans weekend:

When to go. Avoid high summer if you can — June was brutally humid with heat advisories. Spring or autumn would be far kinder.

Where I stayed. The Arts / Warehouse District — walkable to both the French Quarter and the WWII Museum, and quieter than staying right on Bourbon Street.

Carry cash. A few things here are effectively cash-only — I got caught out with only cards and had to come back the next day for my Café du Monde beignets and to tip the Preservation Hall band. Bring some cash and you won’t have to backtrack.

Eat real meals. The food is half the reason to come — don’t try to power through the day on snacks like I did.

The things worth booking:

Thing	Notes	Rough cost
National WWII Museum	The highlight. Get the “Beyond All Boundaries” film and consider the guided tour. Give yourself more time than I did.	~$76 all-in
French Quarter history walk	A licensed-guide history tour (I did Friends of the Cabildo, from Jackson Square). History-dense — eat first.	~$30
Swamp / bayou tour	Covered pontoon boat with hotel pickup, out to the Barataria / Jean Lafitte wetlands.	~$75 with pickup
Preservation Hall	Standing-room jazz, ~45 min. Punches way above its ticket price.	$28 standing

Getting around. The French Quarter is very walkable. The St. Charles Avenue streetcar is both transport and an attraction — take it out to the Garden District.

Don’t miss: Café du Monde beignets (the Jackson Square stand runs ~24h), St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square, and a Garden District walk.

Vegas and the Grand Canyon, solo

aldrinjenson@gmail.com (Aldrin Jenson) — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:20:00 -0400

Trip: Las Vegas, Nevada + the Grand Canyon, Arizona · May 23–26, 2026 · solo · one backpack

I had a four-day Memorial Day weekend and a simple goal: see one of the iconic, bucket-list American places before I run out of long weekends here. The shortlist came down to Las Vegas (with the Grand Canyon as a day trip) or New Orleans. I went with Vegas, mostly because the Grand Canyon was the real draw — Vegas was the airport you fly into and the spectacle you get for free on either side of it.

So I booked a flight, packed a single backpack, and went alone for four days. This is how it went — the canyon, the Strip, the things I learned, and some honest notes for anyone planning the same trip.

The Grand Canyon at sunrise from the South Rim. This is what I came for, and no photo really does the scale of it justice.

First impressions: an oasis built for splurging

The first thing that hits you, even from the Uber in from the airport, is the setting. It’s a desert — cacti and dry mountains in every direction — and then this dense, glittering city rises out of it like an oasis. The contrast is genuinely striking. And it’s hot — but it’s a dry desert heat, so it’s nowhere near as oppressive as the sticky humidity of somewhere like New Orleans; the sun is intense, but you’re not constantly drenched.

The second thing hits you about ten minutes later: the whole place is engineered to separate you from your money, and it does it brilliantly. Gambling machines are everywhere — sit down at a bar and there’s a slot machine built into the counter in front of you, glowing, waiting. It is so easy to gamble. Showgirls, neon, people in skimpy outfits, free drinks appearing at your elbow the moment you sit down at a table. My one-line summary, which I kept repeating to myself all weekend: it’s an adult Disneyland. A theme park for grown-up vices.

I’ll say up front what I concluded by the end: it’s a fun place to visit and I’m glad I went, but I would not want to live there. By the third day I was ready to leave. It feels like exactly what it is — a place in the desert you come to for a few days of fun, and then you go home.

The “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign, lit up at night — the first stop on the overnight tour out to the canyon.

Saturday — downtown and Fremont Street

I stayed downtown at the Four Queens on Fremont Street, rather than on the Strip. I’d worried about street noise, but I lucked into a room on the quiet side, high up around the tenth floor, so it was fine.

Fremont Street at night is basically a compressed, slightly seedier Times Square: a barrel-vaulted canopy of lights overhead, street performers everywhere, a zip-line running over the crowd, and dancers in not-much-clothing up on platforms by the bars. It’s loud and a lot, in the way the whole city is a lot.

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Fremont Street at night — the light canopy overhead, performers everywhere, a permanent party.

Downtown also has two museums worth knowing about, both a short walk from the Four Queens: the Mob Museum — the history of organized crime in America, set in an old federal courthouse — and the Neon Museum, the “boneyard” of retired Vegas signs. Both only open in the afternoon (around 4 PM), so I worked them into the trip later rather than on arrival. My “lunch,” eaten mid-afternoon, was a big All-American breakfast at a downtown diner — the first of a lot of huge American plates this trip.

Once the afternoon opening hours rolled around, I spent some time at the Mob Museum — the history of organized crime and law enforcement in America, housed in a genuine former federal courthouse a couple of blocks from the hotel. I wandered it on my own (no tour). It was okay — a bit on the pricey side for what it is — but genuinely interesting in places: the story of how Italian immigrants arrived and the way that ties into the broader history of immigration and migration, and the famous figures like Al Capone. More than once it had me thinking of The Godfather. Worth a look if you’re downtown anyway.

That night, a little before 10 PM, I went down to the hotel lobby for the part of the trip I’d actually come for.

Sunday — the Grand Canyon (the whole point)

This was the heart of the trip, and the reason I’d pick this itinerary again.

I’d booked a small-group sunrise tour out to the Grand Canyon, and the logistics are wild: the “Sunday” tour actually picks you up Saturday night, around 10 PM, and drives through the dark so you reach the rim for sunrise. We went out in a white Mercedes Sprinter van — a group of about eleven — with a Korean guide named Sean and a Las Vegas local named Deziree (“Dez”) running the day.

The first real stop was a stargazing break out in the desert, far from any city light. The sky was unbelievable — a proper carpet of stars, something I’d never seen like that growing up around city lights.

Then, after roughly four hours of driving, we reached the South Rim for sunrise, around 5 AM. Because tourism was noticeably down that season, the rim was nearly empty — almost no crowds at one of the most-visited places in America.

And then you see it.

Sunrise at the rim. I stood there with my arms out because that’s genuinely how it makes you feel. The single thought that struck me, standing there, was just: it was so big. Pictures genuinely don’t prepare you for the scale. It was majestic in a way I wasn’t ready for — I felt like I could sit there and stare at it for hours. Standing at the edge I said a very small, quiet prayer — just “this is impressive, and thank you for showing me this.” It felt like the right response to something that big.

The one thing I’d change: time. The tour had a lot of ground to cover, so I got maybe ten or twelve minutes at the rim before it was time for the group photos and back to the van. I left wanting much more, and I have a real feeling I’ll come back someday and spend a proper amount of time there. If the Grand Canyon portion had been twice as long, the trip would have been perfect.

Proof I made it. Tourism was so quiet that season that the rim itself was nearly empty.

One thing I couldn’t stop thinking about: the Colorado River at the bottom now looks tiny. It’s genuinely hard to picture how that small a river carved something this vast. I asked the guide about it on the spot, and I’ve been meaning to watch some explainer videos ever since to actually understand the geology.

Horseshoe Bend — the Colorado River wrapping a full U-turn around the rock, seen from the cliff above.

The other stops

The tour was really a tour of canyon country, not just the Grand Canyon:

Horseshoe Bend — the famous sweeping bend in the Colorado River, seen from the cliff above. Genuinely striking; I took a lot of photos here.
Lower Antelope Canyon — the narrow, sculpted slot canyon with the light coming down through the walls. Very interesting, but it ran long — we had about an hour and forty minutes, and by three-quarters of the way through I’d seen what there was to see and was ready to head back.
Lake Powell — a quick stop, fine but rushed.

Lake Powell — the last stop of a very long day, blue water in the middle of all that desert.

Inside Lower Antelope Canyon — the sandstone is sculpted into these smooth orange waves, with light coming down through the slot above.

The people made it

Here’s my biggest takeaway from the whole trip, and it’s about how I traveled more than where: for a solo trip, take the guided tour whenever you can. You get the history and the context you’d never piece together alone, and — maybe more importantly — you get people. Over the long day I talked to almost everyone in the van: Laura, Swedish but raised in Argentina; Dina from Russia; three young Korean women who were endlessly photographing everything; a Mexican family living in Florida; and a solo woman from Queens.

The one who stayed with me was Dez, the guide. Over food she told me her story — foster care, a mother who struggled with addiction, a grandmother who raised her but was hard on her — and how she’d worked her way up through driving big bus tours into guiding. She was warm and funny and good company all day. I tipped her well. (She also quietly waved the new $100 non-resident park fee when I showed my New York ID — more on that fee in the practical notes.)

The drive itself was its own kind of education. Watching the landscape roll past for hours — mountain ranges, canyons, water, valleys, buffalo grazing, small towns — I kept being struck by how vast and varied this country is, and how much engineering it takes to make it all work (the Hoover Dam, the roads cut through mountains). It’s the kind of thing you can only really feel by crossing it overland.

We got back to Vegas around 6:30 PM — I’d been awake and moving for roughly 24 hours — and somehow my body was fine.

Sunday night — the Neon Museum (skip it)

After a shower and dinner I went out to the Neon Museum, the “boneyard” of retired Vegas signs. Honest verdict: not worth it.

The old Stardust sign at the Neon Museum. The signs are cool to look at — I just didn’t think it was worth the price. It was $35 to get in plus $15 for the guided tour, and the guide’s history narration didn’t land for me. If you’re tight on time or money, this is the easy thing to cut.

Monday — the Strip

Monday was my one full free day, and I spent it walking the Strip end to end, gawking at the architecture and watching the city do its thing.

The Fountain of the Gods inside Caesars Palace — fake sky, real marble, completely over the top, and I loved it.

I went from one themed mega-casino to the next: Luxor (the black glass pyramid), New York-New York (a whole skyline rebuilt indoors), Caesars Palace (which was genuinely impressive), the Bellagio (the conservatory gardens and the fountains — a highlight), the Cosmopolitan, and the Venetian. The Venetian was my favourite — the indoor canals and painted-sky ceiling and the gardens reminded me of actually being in Venice a few months earlier, and it was lovely in its own slightly unreal way. Somewhere near there I found a Zoltar machine — the fortune-telling automaton from the movie Big — which was a fun little thing to stumble on.

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The Bellagio’s conservatory gardens — an enormous, elaborate indoor flower display that they redo through the year. One of the nicer free things on the Strip.

The big-ticket item was the Sphere — the giant spherical venue — where I saw their cinematic production of The Wizard of Oz on the enormous wraparound screen. My honest take: it was okay. The technology is genuinely something — watching anything on a screen that big and immersive is a real experience — but I wish they’d played something newer. The Wizard of Oz is a very old film, and I kept wishing the incredible screen had a more modern movie to show off with. Still, no regrets seeing it; the Sphere is one of those things you go to Vegas to see.

“The Wizard of Oz” at the Sphere. The screen is genuinely incredible — I just wish they’d put a newer film on it.

One small thing I’d recommend, which I stumbled into on my second-to-last night: back at the hotel, I watched the whole of The Hangover. Watching it in Vegas, after a few days of actually walking these streets and casinos, was oddly perfect — half the gags suddenly made sense, and I recognised the places and the whole ridiculous logic of the city in a way I never would have from my couch in New York. Highly recommend it as your in-room entertainment.

On gambling — I watched, I didn’t play

I’d been struck on day one by how aggressively the city pushes gambling, and I’ll admit I was curious. But I never gambled — it just seemed like a bad idea, money lit on fire by design. What I did do, quite a lot, was wander the casino floors and watch people play. The thing I remember most is the older women parked at the slot machines for hours, cigarette smoke hanging over everything, the workers bringing them free drinks to keep them seated and playing. The whole machine of it — the lights, the noise, the free booze, the slot built into the bar — is engineered so precisely to keep you there that watching it was more interesting to me than joining in.

The food

I’ll be honest: food was not the highlight of this trip the way it is in some cities. It was mostly big American plates — that opening All-American breakfast, burgers, some Mexican food that was decent — and the portions were huge. There’s no shortage of food in Vegas; there’s almost too much of it. The tour included a breakfast and lunch stop out in canyon country, which were fine. If you’re going to Vegas for the eating, the high-end celebrity-chef restaurants are the move — I kept it simple and cheap, and that was the right call for a trip that was really about the canyon.

What I made of it

Vegas is exactly what everyone says it is: an adult Disneyland in the desert — a place engineered for a few days of spectacle and indulgence, and then you leave. I had a good time, I’m glad I saw it, and I have zero desire to go back or to live anywhere near it. By day three the novelty had worn through and I was ready for the airport. That’s not a complaint — I think that’s the city working as intended.

What I didn’t expect was to find the city’s origin story so interesting. Las Vegas began as a small railroad town, and then boomed in the 1930s when thousands of workers arrived to build the Hoover Dam and Nevada legalised gambling at the same time — the casinos essentially grew up to entertain the dam workers, and everything since has been built on top of that. (The railroad thread was a nice echo of my earlier trip to Sacramento, where the railroad’s history was the whole story too.) Talking to my Uber drivers filled in the rest: almost none of them are originally from Vegas — people move here from all over the country to make money and then move on — and, to a person, every one of them was firmly against gambling. It’s a transient, car-dependent, dry desert city built around an industry most of the people running it would tell you to stay away from. That contrast stuck with me.

But the Grand Canyon was the real thing, and it more than justified the whole trip. It was the most majestic thing I’ve seen — big enough to reset your sense of scale — and my only regret is that I didn’t get to sit with it longer. I’ll be back for that.

The other thing I took home wasn’t a place at all, it was a method: solo travel plus a guided tour is a great combination. You get the depth of someone who knows the place, and you get a van full of strangers from all over the world to talk to for a day. For a trip I took entirely alone, I was rarely actually lonely.

It was a memorable weekend. I’m really glad I went.

Practical notes

For anyone planning a Vegas + Grand Canyon long weekend:

The Grand Canyon is the trip — build around it. Vegas is fun for two days, three at most. The canyon is what you’ll remember. If I did it again I’d find a tour that gives you more time at the rim, even if it means fewer other stops.

You don’t need to drive. I don’t have a US license, so I did everything by tour and rideshare (Uber/Lyft are instant in Vegas, 24/7, even at 2 AM). The Grand Canyon day was a pickup-to-drop-off tour from the hotel.

The overnight thing is real. A “Sunday” sunrise tour picks you up Saturday around 10 PM. You basically don’t sleep that night — nap beforehand and bring a neck pillow for the van.

The $100 non-resident park fee. As of January 1, 2026, there’s a $100-per-person fee for non-US-residents at several big national parks, including the Grand Canyon, collected on the day. I’m on a visa and had budgeted cash for it — but when I showed my New York State ID, the guide waved it. Carry your ID; bring the cash just in case.

Downtown vs. the Strip. I stayed downtown (Fremont Street), which was cheaper and has its own Times-Square-ish energy, but it’s a $15-ish rideshare from the Strip. If the Strip casinos are your main interest, staying on the Strip saves you the back-and-forth.

It’s hot, but dry. Vegas in late May was properly hot — the sun is intense — but it’s a dry heat, so much more bearable than a humid city. Carry water and sun protection and you’re fine.

Layers for the canyon. The South Rim at sunrise was around 59°F / 15°C; Antelope Canyon and Horseshoe Bend later were closer to 77°F / 25°C. Bring a light jacket, a brimmed hat, sunscreen, and water.

The things worth doing:

Thing	Notes	Rough cost
Grand Canyon sunrise tour	The reason to come. Small-group van from your hotel; includes Antelope Canyon + Horseshoe Bend. Get one with more rim time if you can.	~$384 + fees/tip
The Sphere	Worth seeing once for the screen alone. I saw The Wizard of Oz — hoping they add newer films.	~$124
Bellagio fountains + conservatory	Free, and genuinely lovely.	Free
Walking the Strip casinos	Free spectacle — Venetian, Caesars, Luxor, New York-New York.	Free
Mob Museum	Organized-crime history in an old courthouse downtown. Interesting in parts (the Italian-immigration story, Al Capone), a touch pricey. Self-guided.	~$30
Neon Museum	I found it overpriced and skippable.	$35 + $15 tour

Don’t bother gambling unless you actively enjoy it — the whole place is built to take your money, and watching it work is half the fun anyway.

Travel on Aldrin Jenson

A solo weekend in New Orleans

First impressions: a wall of humidity

Friday — the French Quarter

Preservation Hall

Saturday morning — into the swamp

Saturday afternoon — the National WWII Museum

Dinner at Cochon

Sunday — a slow goodbye

Music everywhere

By the river

The food

What I made of it

Practical notes

Vegas and the Grand Canyon, solo

First impressions: an oasis built for splurging

Saturday — downtown and Fremont Street

Sunday — the Grand Canyon (the whole point)

The other stops

The people made it

Sunday night — the Neon Museum (skip it)

Monday — the Strip

On gambling — I watched, I didn’t play

The food

What I made of it

Practical notes

See also