There’s no place like the Las Vegas airport

Spending the week in the great Pacific Northwest is always an adventure for desert guys like me. Five days -- five days! -- of rain is enough, if you ask me.

But forget about the precipitation differences, let's think about the airport differences.

First, Seattle has an airport that is open and spacious. Beautiful, really.

Plenty of fairly good restaurants in which to sit and enjoy a meal. Great coffee shops every 50 yards.

Las Vegas meanwhile, has the look and feel of a third-world market. The walkways are restricted by little sidewalk magazine and sandwich shops ... even a jewelry store, for goodness sake. The carpet (at least in the walkway to the "C" gates) looks like it was rescued from the old Showboat Hotel. Simply filthy.

Seattle has spacious, comfortable seating at the gates, some even with outlets for your computer. Seattle even has newspaper vending machines near the gates where people wait. Imagine that, newspapers for sale where the people actually sit.

Las Vegas has NO newspaper vending machines, forcing people to buy the Las Vegas Review-Journal (the best guide to Las Vegas there is, if I do say so myself) inside crowded sundry stores. Las Vegas not only has slot machines in the waiting areas, it has "smokers only" slot areas.

It is clear that in Seattle the airport bosses are thinking about the traveler first. In Las Vegas, the airport bosses are thinking about the vendor first.

Second, it irritates me to no end to know that one whole floor of the McCarran parking garage is taken up by the cars of airport employees. This when the parking garage often fills up, forcing patrons to park in the overflow lot. It's an outrage, really. If the Clark County Commission had its collective head screwed on right, they'd end that arrogant practice.

But, finally, (and this what I really wanted to say here) for all those gripes, I must say one thing that trumps all my pet peeves -- there is nothing more special in the traveling world than the Las Vegas airport.

Where else to people routinely applaud when they land? Very few, in my experience. When people de-plane, they are happy and they move through the facility with an excitement that just doesn't exist elsewhere. In Seattle, for example, people moved about their business normally. They dressed their age. They dressed, it is my theory, like they would dress when they are at home.

Not in Las Vegas. Here we have grandmothers skipping off airplanes dressed like pole dancers. Groups of men and women give each other high-fives and yell "woo-hoo!" for no apparent reason.

Going home, of course, the crowds at the airport are a bit more subdued. But still, I'm sure no one will disagree with me when I say -- there is no place like the Las Vegas airport.

(Smoker alert: A reader correctly points out at the smoking slot machine areas no longer exist at the Las Vegas airport. Smoking is banned at the airport.)