Vegas Vacation
July 18th, 2006Faith and I just got back from a short vacation in Las Vegas. This was our first time in Las Vegas together, and I can certainly say I had a better time this time than I did on my last visit. Not that I didn’t have a great time on my last visit. I was part of a bachelor party, and I remember these details:
- I didn’t sleep the first two days
- I believed that the more I drank and the less I paid attention to the craps table, the more I won
- I started laughing uncontrollably at the blackjack table and ran off, leaving my chips at the table
- I think I called Faith at 4am and told her I wanted to become a journalist, and that we had to figure out how to pipe oxygen into our apartment’s air supply
- There was an unfortunate episode on the flight home involving a steak and turbulance
Details are sketchy past that. So this trip went MUCH more smoothly. Well, smoothly with the exception of our first morning in Vegas. We landed at 8am and had a lot of time to kill before check-in, so we wound up in a timeshare presentation. Long story short: the guy pitching us was a pleasant and elderly man named Sheldon (straight out of Glengarry Glen Ross, swear to god). The upside: we received $75 in cash and a pair of free tickets to the Shark Reef at Mandalay Bay (where we got to skip to the front of the line). Plus, the presentation easily killed close to five hours of our day. That evening, we wandered somewhat aimlessly and made a blood pact never to go to one of those presentations again, regardless of the perks.
Day two, we did a bit of sightseeing on the strip and saw “Le Reve” at the Wynn hotel in the evening. There wasn’t much story to it, but it was a very visual show. Our seats were a bit more interactive also, since we were sitting in the aptly named “splash zone”. Between watching incredible feats of stage design, acrobatics, and dance were were also constantly looking to see if we would be hit from an errant wave kicked up by the action. After the show we wandered in the surrounding hotels a bit, but I started to get tense because they all started to look the same after a while, and I didn’t know what we were doing at that point. We retreated back to our hotel on the old strip, and started having fun again playing blackjack at the $2 table. In an effort to create a dramatic memory, when I felt I was done playing, I bet all my winnings on my final hand, and lost. Would have made a great moment to have won, but I was only out $20 in the first place, so it wasn’t much of a hardship.
Day three, we got a lot more organized and learned about the $2 shuttle that travels up and down the strip. We went to Mandalay Bay to cash in our free Shark Reef tickets. We got to pet a small stingray, and watch sharks, jellyfish, and more. Afterwards, we went over to New York, NY and rode the roller coaster. Incidentally, the coaster was quite a bit more intense than either of us had planned for. After the coaster, we went to see “Zumanity”, a semi-explicit show by Cirque du Soleil. We liked that show a bit more than “Le Reve” because it both included nudity, and was funny to boot. After the show we went back to the old strip to play more blackjack and get a lesson on playing craps.
We both lost a little money gambling, but compared to eating or seeing shows in Vegas, losing money at a $2 blackjack table is a real bargain. Ninety minutes of “Zumanity” cost us over $150. Three hours of blackjack only cost us $20 each, and we got free drinks during that time. Not that it mattered ? all the money we gambled with was courtesy of our timeshare experience anyhow.