Your love is like a city I visited
(see the full photo album @ flickr)
Las Vegas… this place also gets put in the “wtf were they thinking when they decided to build a city here” category.
I left Coachella nice and early so I’d have a few hours of daylight to have a look around. To my dismay my SatNav told me it was a nine and a half hour drive through the Mojave Desert… Google Maps had assured me it wouldn’t take any longer than four.
Fortunately I arrived almost five hours early. (And I still have no idea where I’d have ended up if I listened to the SatNav).
Las Vegas is best summed up as one big paradox. Half of it is luxurious and clean, the other half is cheap and trashy.
I chose to stay in the cheap and trashy part (and I SWEAR I only picked the hotel below because it was the cheapest…).
I spent my mornings hanging out with roudy Brits in some crazy big sports bar called the ESPN Zone, which is part of the mind-boggling New York New York hotel (a hotel modelled quite literally off the New York skyline, complete with it’s own mini Brooklyn Bridge).
But of course in Vegas it’s just another hotel, with replicas of Paris, Rome, Egypt, some whacky medieval castle, etc.
I was also staying across the road from the MGM Grand, which by the look of it would have been pretty damn impressive about twenty years ago, but is getting a bit old now. Of course this also meant I heard a hell of a lot about the “big fight” which is on in a few days time. Apparently the whole world is waiting for it…
Fortunately (or unfortunately seeing I rarely came out on top) I only gambled in the classier parts of town, including the ridiculously classy Wynn (with it’s own Ferrari dealership inside) and my favourite place of all, the Bellagio.
Bellagio and Caesar’s Palace
The lobby of the Bellagio, full of crazy sculpted glass and water features.
On my last night I ventured off The Strip and over to world-famous Rio casino hotel, randomly stumbling across a casino named Gold Coast upon the way…
There was also no better place to continue my American Fast Food Tour:
Del Taco. On every street corner but incredibly overrated.
In-N-Out Burger, with the same menu they had 50 years ago… I had a Root Beer.
My favourite, Taco Bell. Their “New 7-Layer Crunch Wrap!” is brilliant.
…
Your love is like a city I visited
Your love is like a city that burnt me good
Oh Las Vegas,
I could only afford one weekend
Literally.
…
As I was driving away from Las Vegas in the general direction of the Pacific Ocean, I very randomly passed the site of one of the greatest movies ever made:
I drove down it for a couple of kilometres.
I can see why they made a horror movie here, it’s incredibly eerie.
At the same time I can see why it was the lowest-grossing movie of all-time; there’s absolutely nothing there. Even by desert standards it’s pretty barren.
