(Note: these are deliberately out of order. Deal with it.)


We arrived in Las Vegas having driven 1200 miles in two days. At almost 10pm. The day before we had been in San Francisco and, to be honest, I thought it was shit. Things had started off badly when we discovered that our hotel was directly opposite an establishment called "The Stud Bar". They only got worse from there. Finding a place to drink that wasn't a gay bar was surprisingly difficult, and I really don't care how bad that sounds. After having been on the road for the best part of 10 hours, all I wanted was to reach for a cold beer not a reach-around.

San Fran also smelled terrible. And it wasn't just the seals.

We did find somewhere to drink, and there is probably a story there but this post is about Vegas. So we arrived quite late, which in Vegas is irrelevant but we were very nearly ruined at this stage. We had decided on booking hotels as "rounds". After the San Francisco debacle, we wanted something a bit more upmarket. Unfortunately, due to an issue with having two browser windows open simultaneously and a possibly drunk computer operator, the hotel we booked was, well, worse.

You see Vegas isn't just brightly lit Casinos, coked-up strippers and Elvis impersonating wedding celebrants. You might have seen an episode of CSI, perhaps. We were pretty much staying in one.

To be fair the hotel wasn't terrible, sure the WiFi required you to sit by the door to get a solid connection, and the experience created by the pulsing of the hot water in the shower was about as close to menopause as I ever want to get, but other than that it was comfortable. Unfortunately the area it was in, well it was not really Vegas you might expect. For example, we arrived at the hotel apparently just a few minutes after the police did. Flashing red and blues, not quite the big lights and floor show you want to see at the place you are spending the next couple of nights.

The problem with the hotel was that it wasn't on the Strip. The second you step off the Strip in Vegas, you step into one of the most depressing places I've ever been too. We were just a few blocks from it, but the place had an overwhelming sense of despair about it. The morning after we arrived, I went for a walk to the Walgreen's (on the strip itself) to buy some shampoo. The second I left the hotel I was asked if I had any change (another good sign), I passed some bloke talking to his bail bondsman on his mobile (we just got out apparently), and then got asked another two times for spare change.

The two hundred in cash I had in my wallet felt like a bit of a liability at this point. The best part was I had to walk back that way carrying my new purchase in hand. But that was the morning after the night before, and the night before is a better tale.

As I said, we arrived rather late. We didn't even leave the hotel until after midnight, caught some bus for people who gambled away their cars and rolled up at the first Casino that we had heard of, which happened to be The Mirage. I was dying for a Bourbon at this stage, having probably gone 20 hours without a drink, so I made a beeline to the nearest bar. Casinos generally will comp your drinks if you are actively gambling, even if its playing a 1c slot machine. I take my drinking more seriously than I do my gambling, so I wasn't going to wait around for 20 minutes pressing buttons to get a free drink. We walked and drank through a few of the clubs, before finally settling on a little bar not far from the floor that was fairly quiet by that stage of the night. Or at least it was quiet until the Australian's turned up.

And it was us either. From out of nowhere pounced two Australian girls doing the country proud and getting absolutely written off in the process. Immediately recognisable before the accents were even heard was the Australian swagger (stagger). They were pissed.

The older of the two worked at < a major international law firm >, and the other I never found out what she did because she immediately, and inexplicably, hated me. Her friend, however, was friendly enough for the two of them and at some point broke out into an impromptu strip tease. A Canadian guy who was doing his best to deny he was with the two girls looked on disappointingly. Apparently he had a flight early in the morning, and from what we could gather he wouldn't be shedding a tear on leaving Vegas far behind. He probably was with one of them, or at least thought he was 10 drinks ago, I never found out.

Not long after the Aussies left us, the bar closed (yeah, bars do close in Vegas) and we headed back out onto the casino floor. Being the worst tourists ever, we didn't really gamble much. The way I saw it, the biggest gamble I was prepared to take in Las Vegas was leaving our hotel after dark.

We were all starting to feel the long drive by this stage, and after we stopped drinking and started post-Bourbon crashing, we decided to head back to the hotel. We headed to the front door to find a taxi, that was a challenge in itself. They don't exactly advertise exits in Vegas casinos, if you can find one you its more than likely that you were actually looking for the rest rooms. At the taxi rank we once again completely missed the queue and hoped in a cab further down the queue. The driver this time wasn't going to put up with that sort of flagrant rule breaking and kicked us out. We rejoined the queue (which consisted of one other group ahead of us), and two minutes later we hopped back in the same cab. Rules is rules.

In all too familiar fashion the cab driver had absolutely no idea where we wanted to go. Regardless, he took off out of the rank at neck-snapping speed and joined the traffic on the Strip. He didn't have a GPS, and when we started rattling off landmarks to help him he told us he had only become a taxi driver that week. His car control suggested it might have also been the same time he became a driver. His English, that it was about the same time his plane landed. At this point, I was starting to wonder if there was a grave already dug for us in the desert, or if we might have to dig them ourselves. He eventually stopped at a set of lights and turned to the driver in the taxi next to him and asked him how to get to our hotel.

The other driver, not surprisingly, had no idea either. So he pulled out his refidex. The lights went green. Then red. Then green. You might be thinking that Vegas was a difficult city to navigate. It isn't. There is one road, and everything is either to the left or the right of it. That's it. And on that road you either head north or south. We were no longer on it, and in his week as a taxi driver he hadn't learnt which part of the city was north and which was south.

Thankfully, he was able to get a grasp of where our destination might be and we took off again. I'm fairly sure the light was red when we drove through it, but at this point I was just happy to be heading in what I hoped was the right direction.

Against all odds we arrived to the hotel. Of course it wasn't going to be that easy. After arriving at the hotel and pointing this out to him, he decided to keep driving.

"This one here, the white one."
"Just stop here."
"Here!"
"STOP!"

We gave him exact change, obviously no tip. And walked off to the hotel. Naturally, bums were waiting and asking for spare change. I gave one of them a dollar, because at least he knew where our hotel was.