The flight from Burbank is so short you barely have time to drink your Bloody Mary. Only 180 minutes after locking the door of my humble Los Angeles bungalow, I’m hurled into a different civilization ruled by bombastic architecture, disorienting scale, and a dizzying heat that feels like it’s searing my sandals to the bottom of my feet.

I love it.

As the sun went down, a thunderstorm swept through the sky, sending sheets of rain that blurred our view until we couldn’t even see the names of the casinos across the street. We watched as the wind tossed a piece of scaffolding like a toy. Las Vegas Boulevard gushed with rapids running calf-deep. Trees toppled, neon darkened, and somewhere below us, a ceiling collapsed, flooding the casino floor.

Just the presence of wind and water was enough to confuse our perception of the Strip’s manufactured theatricality. Was that lightning or the video screen at the Wynn? Thunder or the cannonballs at Treasure Island? Was the Venetian really flooding? Like everything else in our view, the storm was brazenly over-the-top, and our hotel room window became a wide-screen HD monitor for the evening’s best show. Even the weather is bigger in Vegas.