Link to Part I

On Friday night, we went to the Stratosphere for dinner, which might well be the single most expensive meal I have ever had. Gail and I got the “dinner for two“, which was one price for two appetizers, chateaubriand for two, and a dessert to split. We had a Caesar salad and the lobster bisque, both of which were excellent. Our chateaubriand was rarer than Gail likes, but Jeff and Kerri also got the dinner for two, and theirs was more well done than ours, so Jeff and I split the medium-rare one while the girls split the well-done one. The dessert was a Chocolate Stratosphere (see picture), which was basically a sculpture of the Stratosphere itself made out of chocolate on top of chocolate sauce, with vanilla sauce drizzled on top. Yum.

Our final bill only had three items on it:

Dinner for two: $170
Tea: $3.50
Tea: $3.50

The food was outstanding, and the view was pretty amazing as well. It’s a fair ways from the rest of the big hotels on the Strip though. We took the monorail to the northernmost stop and then walked about ten minutes to get there, but it certainly wasn’t the nicest part of town that we were walking through. I didn’t think it was that bad, but some of our group were downright frightened. It’s just too bad that they didn’t build the Stratosphere a little further south, so it was more in the middle of the Strip instead of way at the north end. The views of the Strip would have been even better.

After the Stratosphere, we visited Fremont Street, which Gail and I missed on our last trip. This is where the older casinos are, along with the famous neon sign with the cowboy. They’ve modernized it by adding this huge video display board that acts as a mile-long ceiling covering the entire street, and they have these cool video shows every hour or so. Apart from that, though, we didn’t find Fremont St. all that interesting. Just more casinos and hotels, none of which are as interesting (or anywhere near as big) as anything on the Strip.

On Saturday night, we took a shuttle bus from Paris over to the Rio, which is just off the strip. We had dinner at an Irish pub before taking in the Penn and Teller show. If you’ve never seen Penn & Teller and you like magic or comedy or both, I highly recommend it. They seem an unlikely pair – Penn is exceptionally tall (his Wikipedia entry says he’s 6′ 6″ but he said during the show that he was 6′ 7″) with a three-inch goatee (no moustache) and a long ponytail and never stops talking, while Teller is 5′ 9″ and clean-shaven with short hair and didn’t say a single word while on stage (we sat close to the stage and I did hear him talk to one of the audience members who was helping out). As magicians, they are two of the best, but they’re extremely funny as well. Unlike David Copperfield, who seems to want you to believe that what he’s doing is real magic, these guys will be the first to tell you that there is no magic – everything they’re doing is misdirection in one form or another. They stop short of telling you exactly how the tricks are done, but they do drop more hints than other magicians. At one point, Penn begins a trick by saying only “This next trick is done with a piece of thread” and then walking off-stage. Teller then appears to make a ball follow his hand around and jump on its own, but even “knowing” that a piece of thread is involved, we were still mystified as to how it worked. Another trick involved a light projecting a silhouette of a flower onto a piece of paper on an easel. Teller then took a knife and cut leaves and petals off of the silhouette, while the leaves and petals dropped off of the original flower. He then “cut” his hand and while no blood could be seen on his hand, the silhouette of his hand had blood dripping off of it. When he wiped his hand on the paper, bright red blood showed up on the paper while his hand was still undamaged.

Incidentally, if you get there early, check out the jazz duo opening the show. We were in the fourth row on the same side as them, and had a good view. Both the piano player and the stand-up bass player are excellent musicians, but the bass player seemed to be trying to hide his face (with the long goatee) from the audience. He was also exceptionally tall.

Sunday morning, Nicole and Steve took a cab to the airport to pick up two rental cars – both Dodge Chargers – and we drove out to Hoover Dam, about 45 minutes away (or, as it turns out, an hour and a half if you take the wrong highway). First off, I always thought that Chargers were so-called “muscle cars” but if that was a muscle car, then I’m the world’s foremost tech blogger. Maybe there’s a V8 version that’s more powerful, but the 6-cylinder models we got were pretty gutless – and that comes from someone who drives a Sunfire. The dam itself is pretty impressive, as is the way they constructed it. They had to dig four mile-long tunnels to divert the water from the river, then build the dam itself, then plug the tunnels. The tunnels took almost as long to build as the dam, and there’s enough concrete in the dam to pave Rhode Island. They poured concrete 24/7 for almost three years to build it. I could go on and on spouting off facts about the dam, but that’s all available online. Similar to the Grand Canyon, reading about it and seeing pictures of it are interesting enough, but you can’t really appreciate the size and scope of it until you actually see it. Suffice it to say that if you ever go there, the full tour is highly recommended.

A new City Centre complex is being built right on the Strip, between the Monte Carlo and the Bellagio, which consists of several hotels and (gasp!) casinos, as well as some buildings with apartments and condos (can you imagine living right on the Strip?) and even a grocery store. Right now the whole thing just looks like a big eyesore. There are a number of buildings all crammed together and they seem to employ different architectural styles (some buildings are, by design, not completely vertical), and the whole thing is just ugly. Hopefully, that’s just because of the construction and when they’re done it will be better, but I’m not hopeful.

Anyway, a good time was had by all in Sin City. Mental note: remember for the future that there’s no such thing as a “cheap trip to Vegas”.

We’ve been back from our long weekend in Las Vegas for over a week now, and I’m just getting around to writing about it. That’s mainly because I’m trying to catch up on the sleep that I missed. The rule is that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, and some of it will, but we had a lot of fun and did a lot of cool things, so I’m going to write about it anyway, but I’m going to break it up into a couple of parts. If you want the picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words version, pictures are posted here.

Gail and I went to Vegas once before, back in 2005 for our tenth wedding anniversary. We had a great time, so when some friends decided that they were going down on the long weekend in May, they mentioned it to us. Originally, we figured it would be too expensive so we decided not to go, but then they told us about the deal they had gotten at the MGM Grand – something like $350 for four nights. We priced the Venetian for the same time period: over $1350. We found flights for about $150 each (each way), so we decided to go. How often can you get four days in Vegas for under $1000? Well, obviously you need to add some for food. OK, plus tickets to any shows you want to see. And taxis. And the monorail. And service charges and airport taxes on the airfares. And gondola rides at the Venetian. And car rental to drive to Hoover Dam and the tours of Hoover Dam itself. And souvenirs and gifts for the kids. And of course gambling money. Considering we’re going to the UK this summer, and my company has delayed our salary raises for at least three months (assuming there are raises at all this year), and Gail’s income has dropped by 5% thanks to her company’s salary cuts, well maybe this wasn’t such a cheap vacation after all. But hey, it’s only money, and we had a lot of fun, so I don’t regret it for a second.

The MGM Grand is unbelievably big. There are over 5,000 rooms, a monster casino, sports book, a gift shop and several other shops, five pools and a lazy river, a TV studio, two spas, an arena for boxing and other sporting events and concerts, a monorail station, a theatre showing a Cirque du Soleil show, and countless restaurants and bars. Oh, and a lion enclosure. If you’re hungry, you’ve got your standard Vegas buffet (required by law at all casino resorts, I believe) as well as the Rainforest Cafe, another cafe, a grill, a deli, a sandwich place, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Mexican, two French places, a steak house, a seafood place, and a “California cuisine” place owned by Wolfgang Puck. And if all that’s not enough, there are two Starbuck’s and a food court with five more places including McDonald’s. We arrived on Thursday night, and by the time we left on Monday afternoon, we could usually find our way to where we needed to go without getting lost. But the sheer size of the place meant that it took forever to get anywhere. We stayed at the Mirage last time, and it was also big, but not outrageous. This place was just too big. In contrast, our room was actually quite small, but very nice. It was only the two of us and all we did there was sleep and shower, so we didn’t really need any more space.

Since the hotels on the strip are so big (many of them take up a city block each), walking between them can take a long time. Combine that with the zillion-degree temperatures in the summer, and you have a fairly hefty need for a rapid transportation system. So the city has put in a monorail that runs behind the hotels on the east side of the Strip. MGM is the southern-most station, and there are also stops at Bally’s, the Flamingo, Harrah’s and the Sahara, as well as a couple of stops off the Strip. It’s great if you’re going, like we did, from MGM up to the Stratosphere, which is about a 6 km walk. It’s not cheap – a single ride, regardless of distance, is $5 each, though you can get a day pass for as many rides as you want in a 24-hour period for $13. That turned out to be a better deal for us, and we ended up doing that twice. Apart from the cost, there is another problem with the monorail which involved, again, the size of the hotels. At one point we were headed to Paris, so we took the monorail from MGM to Bally’s (right next door to Paris). The elevators to our room were at the front of the MGM, so we had to walk all the way to the back, which was at least five minutes. Then we took the monorail one stop (three or four minutes), then had to walk to the middle of Bally’s and over to Paris, which took at least another five minutes. All told it took us about fifteen minutes to get there, at least ten minutes of which was walking. We probably could have walked all the way in that time, so the monorail only saved us a few minutes of walking. Now, we were there in May, so it was pretty hot outside but not unbearable. If it was 105 degrees outside, which is not unlikely in July and August, spending $10 to walk for 15 minutes inside rather than walking for 15 minutes outside might well be worth it.

Coming in our next installment: The Stratosphere and Hoover Dam.