Tacky, excessive, but wonderful (Las Vegas)

Member Name: oxfordbloke

Product:	Las Vegas
Date:	04/07/01 (106 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A truly stunning visual feast, Great for families, gamblers, couples and singles

Disadvantages: Hot, hot, hot

I spent a weekend in Vegas in 1997.

I was working in LA for 2 weeks and went to Vegas from Friday to Sunday with my colleague and friend Dan. He is British but lives in LA which meant he was the ideal guide - new the best places to go and but a healthy dose of British cynicism!

The trip was done on the cheap - we drove across the desert in a hire car (5 hour drive) and stayed in the Motel6 ($50 for a twin room). If you visit midweek you will get a room in one of the fancy casinos for the same money.

The motel was off the main strip but was only a 300 yard walk. Oh, an it was August. How hot? Well, it was windy, and it felt just like a hair dryer!

Both Dan and I love to people watch and Vegas is possibly the ultimate place to partake in this entertaining hobby...

You could be forgiven for thinking that Vegas is full of gamblers, but this is simply not the case. There has been a deliberate move to make the city a family destination, and this has clearly worked. There are many many family attractions and it would be possible to spend a whole week there, or even two, without getting bored.

Obviously, there are loads of casinos, and they range from the massive, outrageous, themed casinos (eg Luxor - a huge black pyramid, New York, New York - a group of skyscrapers with a roller coaster on top!) through to the older casinos that you may of heard of, such as the Golden Nugget and Binions Horseshoe.

It would take 2 or 3 days just to walk through all the casinos, taking in the their different themes.

We gambled a bit in the larger casinos... and lost. The minimum bets on the tables (Roulette, Blackjack etc) are usually $5 or higher, so you can quickly lose quite a bit. Since we had only travelled with $100 of gambling money, this was not a good idea if we were to last the whole weekend, so we went downmarket. In the older casinos there are $1 tables, and we settled for several hours at the Roul
ette table in Alladins.

While the odds in Roulette are against you, with $1 bets you can last a long time. As it was we both won at a gradual rate and made about $30 each. The staff in Aladdins were a lot friendlier that in the large casinos and the customers stayed longer, so we were able to make a few friends.

There was one particularly heart-warming moment - three older people came to our roulette table and put $10 on 33, and one of them said "this is for Billy." The wheel was spun, and 33 came up - $360 in winnings. We couldnt resist asking, and it turned out that Billy had died 2 months earlier. They then cashed in their chips and left. Its nice to know that there are happy ending in the devil's playground!

We didnt go to any shows or other attractions, so read the other ops for information on these. For us, just seeing the amazing buildings and watching people at play was entertainment enough. I will definitely return one day for a week to do it properly.

Oh, and how did we win at roulette? There was a couple of newly weds at our table and they kept winning. It was freaky. Whatever they bet on seemed to come up. So we started copying their bets (a completely flawed logic obviously), but it worked!!

In summary, whether you like gambling or not, you MUST visit Las Vegas. Any description, and photographs, cannot do it justice. The final tally was $100 gain for me, and $50 for Dan. About 50% on tables and $50 on slot machines.

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