Sin City

31 A.D.

[Taking you all the way back to Thursday, 12th July...]

Las Vegas...

...featuring...

...love...

...hate...

...fear...

...loathing...

...and everything else in-between!

Suffice to say we did actually get onto the mid-afternoon bus from Flagstaff to Sin City, even got to sit next to each other (this is important, as it ain’t no fun trying to get to sleep next to a stranger). It had been a long, but pretty uneventful wait in the Greyhound terminal, the only two moments of note being when a seemingly stray greyhound tore through the waiting area, and a Mormon girl said I looked like the Phelps twins who play the Weasley brothers in the Harry Potter films (not heard that one before, took it as a compliment).

[A bit of Arizona from the window of the bus...]

[...and a bit of Nevada from the very same window.]

The bus journey across a dismal Arizona into a dust-swept Nevada was pleasant enough, despite sitting near the back where the rowdy passengers go (many more cuss words and Tim was convinced they were secretly drinking moonshine). Las Vegas loomed large beneath the evening sky, a city of a million tiny neon lights blinking out across the desert. We arrived at the terminal at 8.30 and Kwan, bless him, said he’d phoned his brother to come and collect him and there was room for us in the car. “Steven”, a resident of the city for 30 years, duly arrived and then offered to take us the long way round so we could have an impromptu tour of The Strip which, as I’m sure you all know, is the main boulevard that is lined with the grandest casinos. Even though I was knackered, thirsty, and desperate to get a shower, it was a really nice gesture on the part of Steven (and Kwan) to give us this quick guide to the area.

We are staying at the LVH, once known as the Las Vegas Hilton – a beautiful monstrosity of a hotel complex at 3,000 Paradise Road. The number 3,000 is relevant because that’s about as many guest rooms the place has on offer, although the MGM Grand just down the road beats it with 5,005 – it would take 13 years of your life for you to spend a night in every single one of them. The LVH was once the classy pride of the city, but now rooms are affordable to the likes of Timothy and I due to intense competition. And even though room prices shoot up at the weekend, and we’ll be staying here from Thursday `til Monday, it still feels like we’ve got ourselves a bargain. The room is on the 16th floor, without a view of The Strip, but with a pretty good panorama of the vegas (or “meadows”). We don’t have a fridge or a microwave and the internet is optional and charged at $14 dollars a day, but leaving those things aside, it still feels like we’re in a half-decent hotel room for once. Plus it’s pretty cool to walk through a casino when we leave the elevator and head for the front entrance!

It didn’t take the Grayboys long to freshen up and they headed downstairs, eager to obtain some of the complimentary food and drinks that they’d heard were part and parcel of Vegas casino life. Barely the moment we stepped out of the elevator we almost collided with Miss Tennessee, followed by several other contestants from the Miss America pageant who were exiting the LVH’s showroom. Well I suppose there are worse ways to start your stay here! We had no idea who won, but we hoped it was Miss Mississippi, just to annoy the announcer.

Going back to the free food and drink, I was hoping that, if the legends were true, I’d get fed and watered for next to nothing and my expenses over the next four days would be minimal. However, each time I tried to attract the grim-looking waitresses’ eyes, they ignored me and walked on by. Plenty of people had drinks in their hands and I wondered what they’d done to get them. Suddenly it struck me – those people were sitting down and gambling, not wandering around looking lost with their hands carefully guarding their wallets! There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and if we wanted to get drunk the complimentary way, we’d have to play. Unfortunately it wasn’t part of my plan to chuck away my hard-earned cash on games of chance that payout once a century, so I’d have to re-think my strategy.

We left the LVH and made the five minute walk to The Strip. By now it was quite late and the effects of bad sleep were starting to kick in, i.e. a need for good sleep. That said, we took a little trip inside Circus Circus, another grand hotel-casino complex which was our second choice for staying at. I decided to see if Fate has some wonderful good luck story lined up for me and I put the only dollars-worth I was prepared to pay into a slot machine. I lost. So endeth the great gambling experiment. Tim, on the other hand, won two dollars for his single bill outlay – would he instantly become hooked and fritter away his entire holiday budget in a single evening? Nope, he couldn’t be bothered with any more fruit machines and simply redeemed his winnings like a sensible lad.

Then we went back to LVH to kip.

We woke up on Friday the 13^th (eeek!) with a view to taking the town by storm. However, “storm” was an appropriate word as there were ominous black clouds on the horizon. “But this is Vegas!” we exclaimed, foolishly, “It simply doesn’t rain here!” Wrong. We got halfway to Starbucks and the oh-so-familiar downpour began. What is going on here??? It’s rained in the last six cities we’ve been in! I know we’re English and we supposedly take the weather with us, but this was taking the Michael. So much for this desert city being the hottest part of our entire round the world tour. By the time we got back to LVH, we were sopping wet, but not from a single bead of sweat.

Inevitably the clouds parted and the sun came out, so we hit the road again in the afternoon to load up on supplies from a nearby supermarket...any supermarket (the blocks are bloomin` massive out here and we’re almost tempted to buy monorail tickets to save us walking). Cometh the evening, I had a decision to make – to see or not to see the Grand Canyon. Flagstaff was only 80 miles from it, and we really should have gone while we were there, but we’d been so desperate to get to Vegas that we barely gave it a second thought. Unfortunately it takes twice as long to get there from Sin City, and the cheapest bus tour we could find clocked in at $88 (plus an 8 hour round trip). As much as I’d liked to have seen the giant hole in the ground, I decided that expenses would have to be saved and Tim would have to go on his lonesome. But hey, maybe an enforced what-carcass day might do us some good? Not that we’re at each others’ throats or anything.

Friday night was still young and we donned our glad rags and headed north west to a restaurant that Tim had looked up. Can you guess what television show it was featured on? I’m sure you can. However, the whole complex was now boarded-up, so we had to look elsewhere. As it was on the way, we ducked into Circus Circus for some healthy pizza (and by healthy I mean that it had peppers as part of the topping – gotta get those greens!)

Now, feeling refreshed as the sun went down and heading south on The Strip, it finally seemed like we’d made it, after all the farting around with the buses. Our first stop was the casino known as Treasure Island which, oddly enough, features lots of pirate stuff. Each big casino has its own individual theme – Circus Circus featured acrobatic shows every half hour and the top floor contains all kinds of fairground attractions. But in Treasure Island we cracked it...we understood the Las Vegas law...to get a free drink, you only have to make it look like you’re gambling!

Tim still had his voucher from the previous evening and was keen to have another crack at the 1 cent-a-go slot machines. And so we both sat down to watch his latest efforts and almost immediately a waitress appeared and asked if we wanted a drink. I immediately shouted, “Budweiser please!”, but Tim ummed and ahhed for a while, asking if they had any imported beers, and I worried that our cover would be blown and she’d see that we were gambling for one cent at a time and not worth the hassle. But no, away she went and two minutes later she came back with our beers, and not a couple of watered-down things in plastic glasses, these were real-deal glass bottles! I had no problem giving her the expected one dollar tip for her troubles – can’t complain when you’re paying 65 pence for a Budweiser, can you? I love this town!

After Treasure Island we moved on to The Ventian, which seemed even grander, what with its “canal” that flows through the upper and lower floors of the building. Above the casino floor, the place was designed to look like a real street from Venice and, given that there are no windows and the blue sky painted on the ceiling looked pretty genuine, disorientation set in – were we inside or out? Was it day or night? Who was I and where was I going? 

I’d picked up on a distinct smell upon entering each casino and although I didn't know for sure, I guessed it may be the oxygen they pump through the vents to keep the punters awake and keen to play. Also, I’d never expected these complexes to be so vast, even though I’d been told that they’re designed to get you lost. Given the nature of this trip so far, I was feeling more than a little confused (but also very darned happy!)

By the time we reached Caesars Palace, Tim and I had our system worked out to a tee:

• We find the one cent slot machines and check they are on the route of a waitress (if we can find some next to the tunnel they disappear down to load up their trays, so much the better).
• One of us makes the sacrifice of a dollar and starts playing the machine.
• The other sits next to them and makes it look like they’re playing as well, but really keeps a look out for the waitress and signals for her attention when she appears.
• Next time we're thirsty, we swap over.

In fact, with a few beers inside us, we started taking liberties and not letting a waitress go past lightly. We’d hide our beers down the side of the machines and ask for a bourbon or brandy chaser. When those came, we’d neck `em, then discreetly go back to our beers. What do the waitresses care anyway? They don’t pay for stock and they make a couple of bucks a time for a short walk across the floor.

After exploring the vast Caesar's Palace, it was getting late so we went back to LVH to kip.

Tim was up at 5-something the next morning and I was incredibly glad I wasn't him. Rising at my leisure at 9, I was going to spend the day productively, but not too vigorously. I took a couple of walks here and there, sent a few emails, checked my online accounts (okay so far) and finished off the sitcom pilot I'd started writing in Albuquerque. And, although I thoroughly enjoyed my day to myself, I did miss Our Kid, in a weird kind of way. Guess it was strange not having him there after we've been in each others' pockets virtually 24/7 since the 13th June. He was due back at 9.30 that evening and the agreement was that I'd be ready to go out as soon as he got back. And so, as the sun set, I found myself hanging around waiting for the Canyon Kid to return, with Aerosmith on the stereo and Are you being served? on the television. And with whisky in the jar.

Come 10.30, I was getting a teenty-tiny bit worried, given that programmes on the local station were being interrupted to warn of serious slash flooding in the area. But then he returned after a long hard day of looking down holes and out into the night we went, though it was gone 11 when we left. And Saturday was more of the same as the night before - people everywhere, lights a-flashing, sounds a-buzzing and money going down the drain at a thousand dollars a millisecond. One smartarse waitress did try and bust our moves in Bellagio's by claiming that only Tim could have a drink because he was playing the machines so I quickly inserted a dollar and convinced her that I was also a gambler and entitled to my complimentary beverage.

We went into to Bills casino (presumably names after dollars, not some bloke called William), thinking it was The Flamingo, which had been created by mob boss Bugsy Siegal way back when. Here we were offered cocktails by the waitress, so Tim went for a Long Island Iced Tea and I opted for a Rusty Nail, which I believed was my favourite cocktail since drinking one at The Park pub in Birkdale. Rusty Nail is no longer my favourite cocktail - yuck! While Tim was winning the grand total of $13 on the machines, I scanned the scene around me and made the mistake of looking at a young lad who was having a wristband put on him by a security guy. I wondered if this was because he was allowed to gamble, but not be served alcohol, though Tim reckoned it might be that he'd had enough and shouldn't be served anymore. Whatever the reason, the security guard then came to us and asked for IDs, and we handed over our driving licences and thought that was that. It wasn't. The guard soon returned with the head of security (name tag read "Tim G." - a good omen? Nope!) and he said that the only ID foreigners could use in that zone was a passport. Hmmm, not as if we'd had problems anywhere else! He said he was going to be nice to us, but that because "they are watching", we should leave through one door and come back in through a different door with passports in hand. To me that sounded like we were getting kicked out plain and simple, but it had gone 3 in the morning and I couldn't be bothered politely arguing with the guy. 

So we went back to LVH to kip. 

Now it is Sunday and we haven't done a great deal with our time, except a bit of planning. Tim is doing a helicopter ride above the city tonight, courtesy of his very generous friends, and I'm going to get my dinner from Fatburger, as suggested by Sin City's favourite IT tester, Gary Morris. Given how gargantuan this post is, I'd better sign off before writing any further (thanks for reading this far). Las Vegas has been everything they said it would be, and I've thoroughly enjoyed the experience, but now I'm ready for a change.

Next stop is Salt Lake City to stay with some Mormons...should be a lot of (sober) fun and games!