Tail of the Dragon — © Copy­right 2012 by William Beem

Tail of the Dragon

If you came here because you searched on “Tail of the Dragon” look­ing for infor­ma­tion about Deal’s Gap, you’re in the wrong place. For those of you who don’t know about Deal’s Gap, it’s a won­der­fully twisty road that motor­cy­clists enjoy. I’ve rid­den it before and you need a lot of patience to get through it. That’s because it has 318 curves in 11 miles. Basi­cally, you’re twist­ing your bike from left to right through the whole trip. It’s won­der­ful fun if you don’t wreck. There’s a tree of shame filled with bro­ken motor­cy­cle parts of folks who tried to take the Dragon faster than they could han­dle. In fact, my first impres­sion upon arriv­ing at Deal’s Gap was to see a guy ago­niz­ing over the scrape he put on his new BMW. How­ever, this post isn’t about that place at all.

Instead, it’s quite lit­er­ally about the tail of the dragon I found between the Palazzo & Venet­ian resorts in Las Vegas dur­ing the Year of the Dragon. At least, that’s the title I gave the photo. If you look closely in the cen­ter, you can see the tail of the dragon rest­ing in the pool. I sup­pose that makes sense. From what lit­tle research I’ve done, this is the year of the Water Dragon. Now I never knew there were dif­fer­ent types of drag­ons, but that’s the joy of pho­tog­ra­phy. Some­times you just see some­thing that looks cool and then you have to go find out what the hell it is.

What really attracted me were the red & yel­low lanterns hang­ing from the ceil­ing. The prob­lem is that nobody really wants to know about the Year of the Paper Lantern. It’s just not an excit­ing topic. Now a dragon, that’s dif­fer­ent. Even if it’s just the tail of the dragon. Peo­ple can get excited about the ass-​end of a myth­i­cal, fire-​breathing crit­ter. So for­give me if I took some con­fus­ing license in nam­ing my photo. I just liked the way it looked.