February 18, 2004
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Two days in Las Vegas
We didn’t end up going to the Grand Canyon. After a whole day of walking (6 miles!) from one end of Las Vegas Blvd to the other and back again, we were pretty exhausted. The prospect of waking up bright and early the next morning to drive for 5 hours out to Arizona and back was perhaps too ambitious…
… from our room window at the Tropicana. Below was the pool area of our hotel.
Further out, we can see Excalibur (medieval-themed hotel-casino)So we hung out in Las Vegas (this being our second time), and checked out sights we’d missed last time, which included several hotel-casinos and Downtown Las Vegas -THE place to see old-skool hotel/motel signage and more dancing neon than you could ever imagine.
We didn’t do much gambling… you could say our indulgences were entirely gastronomic. On Sunday we had lunch at Ah Sin (bad pun, yes) – an Asian restaurant at Paris. The desserts were to die for.
At Ah Sin: banana coconut pie (above);
and vanilla sago which came with deep fried (warm!) lychees…On Sunday night, we took Sander’s recommendation and checked out Red Square, a Soviet-themed restaurant-bar at Mandalay Bay, with a giant headless statue of Lenin and about a hundred different kinds of vodka-based specialty martinis with names like “Sputnik One” and ”Cuban Missile Crisis”. Our table was in a private room with red walls, gold mirrors and dark red velvet drapes. A rather expensive and decadent experience, but entirely worth it for a Valentines’ Day celebration. In fact, the place felt more Tsarist than Communist…
The bar at Red Square is made of ice.The thing that grabs you about Las Vegas is the trully awful trashy (mainly’80s )music that tends to follow you wherever you go. It’s everywhere - in the claustrophobic casinos or out on the street blasting out from speakers rigged up in the trees… And what’s worse, the stuff is on a loop.
A-Ha, The Knack, and possibly the worst piece of music ever written – ‘The Pina Colada Song’!
We did stumble across a great Auto Collections Exhibit at The Imperial Palace, which enabled us to undertake some valuable reference for our ‘Endsville’ project… In fact, we were seeing lots of valuable BG reference somewhere between Barstow and Yermo on Hwy 15…
Hey, did someone say ‘Tax Write-Off’????
Comments (4)
Glad to hear that you both came to your senses and stayed in Vegas an extra day..;^) It’s a long haul from Sin City to the Big Trench, we’ve done it and it’s no fun to try and make it in such a short time.I’ve been to Vegas twice, the first time on a weekend with my wife to see Tom Jones (truly wonderful) at the MGM and Siegfried and Roy (truly awful). We also were thrilled to see the remote control headset used in Spock’s Brain at the Star Trek Experience Museum.The last time, I was there for an entire week with my company (SGI) for the NAB trade show. On that trip, I saw Blue Man Group at the Luxor, Los Straightjackets at Mandalay Bay, and hobnobbed with a bunch of slimy studio execs at the Voodoo Lounge. We also spent a small fortune feeding our booth crew every night at very upscale restaurants. I think I needed a bleeding with leeches after that to relieve my gout!
Yeah, we thought about booking ourselves on one of those helicopter tours to the Canyon but they were so expensive… and unsafe too, so we’ve heard!
Wish we could’ve seen Los Straitjackets at the Mandalay Bay! We saw them here in LA a few months ago – pretty cool!
My favourite part of Las Vegas is the people who see no irony in sleeping in a tomb guarded by the Egyptian god of the dead (Luxor).
Tree
Ah… there IS no irony in Las Vegas.
When you are prepared to stay in a Treasure Island or Egyptian pyramid-themed hotel, you know that irony has left the building!
- Lili