Adventures In Vegas

If you look online. you'll find hundred of different sports betting experts each with their own can't-lose method for picking the winners in NFL games. They'll all be happy to let you in on their methods, for a nominal fee of course. Well, we came up with our own method for picking NFL winners and it's every bit as valid as the ones you can buy from those so-called experts! Not only that, but I'm going to give you these picks for absolutely NO CHARGE! You're welcome!

How did we do it? Well, we wrote the names of all 32 NFL teams on cheap plastic golf balls from Big Lots. Then we put the balls that represented all the teams playing this Sunday (only Sunday, no other days count) into a box, then dumped all the balls on the floor! Then we let our cat Sushi and our ferret Wasabi pick whatever teams they wanted! They get five picks. If one of them happens to pick two teams that are playing each other that week, then we let them pick from two separate balls representing the Over and Under for that game instead!

Now, I'm not going to say that these picks guaranteed winners, but THESE PICKS ARE GUARANTEED WINNERS! (not an actual guarantee)

So without further ado, here are the picks for Week One of the 2007 NFL Season:

Home team in CAPS - point spread listed is based on the Arizona Charlies betting line as it was posted on Friday, September 7th

The Cat Picks

Giants +5.5 over COWBOYS
RAMS -1 over Panthers
Eagles -3 over PACKERS
SEAHAWKS -5.5 over Buccaneers
Steelers -4 over BROWNS

The Ferret Picks

Dolphins +3 over REDSKINS
BROWNS +4 over Steelers
Patriots -6 over JETS
CHARGERS -6 over Bears
TEXANS -3 over Chiefs


These picks are for entertainment purposes only, but I'm totally going to fill out a couple of parlay cards on them anyway!

I can't stress this enough, do your homework before you go to Vegas. Figure out where you want to stay, what you want to see, and where you want to eat. For god's sake don't rely on the advertising once you get there. Everything, and I do mean EVERYTHING in Vegas is advertised as being the "Best" "Biggest" Best Value" "Highest Payouts" "World Famous", and my favorite "Voted The Best Of Las Vegas" (by some publication you've never heard of). One of my favorite signs of this ilk you'll see if you drive north on Las Vegas Blvd. past the Strat headed towards Freemont Street. There is a restaurant that advertises it's "World Famous One Pound Liver And Onions Special". Yummy! Find honest websites that have actual reviews from visitors, not ones that just regurgitate press releases. If you find yourself in the mood for a cheap steak dinner your head could explode from trying to figure out where to go if you were just looking at the advertising. You'd probably give up and just eat at the place you're staying, and unless you're staying somewhere expensive, that more often than not turns out to be a mistake. Hey, maybe I'm just anal, but Vegas is a town of great bargains. Half the fun is finding these real bargains amongst all the hype.

When my sister and I booked our first trip to Las Vegas we were very concerned with having transport from the airport to the casino and made sure to opt for the extra charge through Expedia for the shuttle. For chrissake don't worry about this. Somehow, we had this impression that without that computer printed voucher we'd just be stuck at the airport the whole time with no means of escape. (Not that my sister would mind. She'd never leave the airport slots if someone didn't pry her away.). We learned very quickly that this wasn't the case. Vegas is a town that relies on tourist money after all, they're not going to leave you high and dry at the airport when you're willing to pay for a ride. There are about six billion cabs and shuttles at McCarran at any given time just waiting to wisk you to the destination of your choice. The shuttles are cheaper than the cabs, the downside being you're crammed in with a bunch of other tourists and you have to stop at every casino on the route. Cabs are faster, but more expensive, especially if the driver thinks he can get away with taking you the long way around. "Hey didn't we pass the MGM already?"

If you want to travel a good distance on the strip and you don't feel like walking, or if you're looking to get downtown and there's no free shuttle service from your hotel, take the CAT bus system. It's cheaper than a cab ($2.00 a ride, day passes are also available) and it's reliable. On our first trip we were lured by the strip trolley service which was cheaper than the CAT. I don't know if they run this anymore, but you're better off going with the CAT bus. The trolley's were small and crowded despite the fact that Vegas was practically deserted the week after 9/11. It felt like the thing was going to tip over on every sharp turn.

"What about the monorail?" I hear you saying. Don't get me wrong, the monorail (assuming the thing is still running) is GREAT if you want to go from the MGM Grand up to the Sahara, LV Hilton or the LV Convention Center. Anywhere else closer and you're wasting your time. The monorail runs along the back of the strip; so to get to the monorail stations you have to walk through monster casinos, some of which hide the stations pretty well. In the time you spend looking for the stations, you could have already walked to the nearest CAT bus stop.

• One of the best parts of a Vegas trip; waking up in a pitch dark hotel room on the first morning, forgetting where you are for a second then suddenly remembering that you're in VEGAS.

• There’s nothing like flying into Vegas after dark and seeing all those lights to put you in the right frame of mind. Six hours sitting in Coach doesn’t seem to matter once you’ve seen that.

• A quick shower and/or a couple of cups of coffee are as least as good as two hours of sleep in Vegas.

• A red eye flight back to the east coast may seem like a great idea, but it really isn’t. You will not magically wake up fully rested at your destination. Don’t forget that you lose three hours.

• The Bellagio and the El Cortez are two places everyone should visit at least once; preferably during the same trip.

• Vegas operates in a different time stream. Every day feels three days long. When you get there you feel like you never left, but by the time you get home you feel like you never went at all.

• And remember, you’ll have plenty of time to sleep when you get home!

Thursday

You know those movies sequels where the action picks up right where the previous one left off? They have to rebuild the sets and the actors are a couple of years older but it looks almost, but not quite, like a continuation of the first movie? That's what our latest trip to Vegas felt like. Our last trip was just a few months ago, September of 2004. We had spent two nights staying at the Tropicana then traveled downtown to spend the last two at the Golden Nugget. As nice as the Nugget was to stay at, we certainly weren't their target audience where the gambling was concerned. We ended up doing most of it at Fitzgeralds after my then girlfriend (now fiancée!) discovered a very generous Loose Deuces nickel video poker machine which paid her $125 jackpots two days in a row. It was a fun place with a party atmosphere and we pretty much decided at the time that we would stay there on our next trip. We got their players club card and racked up as many points at the blackjack tables and video poker machines as our limited gambling budgets would allow; faintly hoping we'd receive some kind of room offer in the mail. About two months after that trip (or approximately three weeks after giving up hope of receiving anything from them) we got an offer from Fitz. THREE nights free stay, weekend nights no less, plus a special dinner and surprise gift to celebrate our "special day". I'd never gotten comped more than free drinks during my four trips to Vegas so this was a huge surprise! We weren't too sure about the whole vagueness of the "special day" thing, all we could figure is that Andrea's birthday was in January and she had put that down when she signed up for the card. I called Fitz just to make sure that we weren't going to be obligated to sit through a time share seminar or something (you never know) and after a one sided battle against common sense and the household budget, I booked the cheapest flight I could find back to The Greatest City In The World. Our last trip ended with a redeye flight out on a Friday night after spending all week in Vegas. We were exhausted and aching to go home, trapped downtown without a hotel room to retreat to as the new crop of weekend partygoers started to pack Freemont Street. Now here we were, coming back to Freemont Street on a Thursday evening, tired from the flight but raring to go. If it wasn't for the fact that most people were wearing coats due to the chilly weather it would be hard to believe we had ever left. And feeling like you've never left Vegas is no bad thing. I had cajoled my sister into coming to Vegas with her friend Mike at the same time as us. They had flown in from Boston several hours earlier. She was at the "oxygen bar" kiosk on Freemont Street when we got there. I don't get the point of paying $10 to breathe something you get for free, especially when you could feed that money into a video poker machine instead but whatever does it for you I guess. She had ignored my advice about eating at the Golden Gate café or snack bar after getting there and had decided we were going to get the prime rib special at Magnolia's in the Four Queens. I didn't know how my stomach was going to feel about that so I opted for the sushi instead. The sushi was kind of dry and disappointing but I didn't want to complain too loudly since the sushi chef was only about ten feet away and he had a big knife.

After that it was on to some gambling. I had found a $5 chip for the Four Queens amongst my possessions a couple of weeks earlier and I had decided that I was going to take it to the roulette table and put it on 19 since that’s the number my sister and I usually play. I figured since it was money I didn't know I had, it was worth the risk. Not surprisingly, I lost. After that I sat down and dropped another $20 at the table while my fiancée Andrea struck up a conversation with the amiable dealer (or croupier or whatever you call them) who told us all about how he moved out there from New York since he loved Vegas so much. Is there any other city like this? Is there any other place where people are this happy and excited just to be living in, or would just pick up and move to on the drop of a hat? After that we headed back to Fitz, determined to rack up the points in the hopes that we'd get another offer in the future. (Ohh… so that's how they get you!) I don't remember the details of what we did now, it was a long day, but I was able to enjoy the dumpy little guy who sings karaoke-style cover songs next to the blackjack tables. He's not very good but you have to love his enthusiasm. Susie succumbed to the effects of the prime rib dinner and several drinks and went to bed early, so around midnight Andrea and I took a walk with Mike down to Binions Horseshoe because he had never seen the famous poker room. Andrea had been playing a lot of Texas Holdem online since our last trip and had gotten pretty good at it. I had been telling her, half joking, that she'd be playing at Binions soon. After eyeing up the competition at the table, she decided she was going to go for it. She bought in for $55 and when she made it back to the room two hours later she had nearly doubled it! Not bad considering that it was 3 am our time when she sat down at the poker table!

Friday

Andrea was up early the next day, she had decided to play in the $25 buy in tournament at the Luxor and registration started at 9am. She had headed for the Strip before I got out of bed. I met up with Susie and Mike a little later and we caught a bus down to the north part of the Strip to eat at one of our favorite places in Vegas, The Peppermill. The Peppermill serves huge quantities of food and has tons of that old-school Vegas charm; I'd recommend it to anyone. Thanks to all the people on the travel2vegas boards for suggesting it in the first place! Afterwards we walked over to Westward Ho since my sister wanted to play some blackjack there. I got tired of losing at their tables and walked next door to Slots A Fun. I've always had good luck there for whatever reason and this day was no exception. They had a $3 Let It Ride table so I said what the hell. I don't normally play Let It Ride because it's expensive anywhere but Vegas and the house edge is big, but for three bucks it's hard to resist. I hit a straight while I was sitting there and had enough chips to keep me in the green until Susie and Mike showed up. After that we walked over to Circus Circus. I hate this place with every fiber of my being but I always end up in here for some reason; usually because of the $15 for $10 buy in. I got Susie and Mike to get the buy in as well and we headed to the roulette tables to spend em but people were packed in tightly around them not letting anyone in. Susie said 19 hit twice at the table as she was watching, unable to place a bet. We both ended up spending our chips getting our butts kicked at hand dealt blackjack. The best I got was a push. There seems to be a lot more two deck hand dealt blackjack than there was just four months ago, not sure what started this trend but now that the hand dealt no longer intimidates me I'm enjoying it.
After Circus Circus, we caught the bus back downtown. We stopped in the dreaded La Bayou so Susie could play the video blackjack machine that she had inexplicably won $90 on the night before. I threw ten bucks in a nickel slot and watched it disappear. When I turned back to Susie she was cashing out for a $40 profit. Her luck is like that. We went over to Golden Gate where they had a $3 Let It Ride table open, one without a side bet. We all sat down, I bought in for $20, Susie and Mike busted out fairly quickly but I just could not lose. I hit a flush with two bets (no side bet available unfortunately but it saved me money most of the time) and struck up a conversation with the guy next to me who said he used to drive a tour bus for Neil Diamond and once hit a full house with $50 bets at Mandalay Bay. Why he was playing it for three bucks at Golden Gate, I didn’t ask. Susie and Mike has long since wandered off by the time I cashed out, which was a shame because I wanted to show them the nice black chip I got for my efforts. With no one around to impress, I cashed the chip in and headed back to Fitz. I found that Andrea had been back at Fitz for a while and she was giddy with excitement. She had placed fourth out of eighty-three people in the Luxor tournament and won $110! Filled with joy over our newfound gambling wealth, I asked her to marry me right then and there. Maybe not the most romantic way, but it felt like the right time to do it.

At 4:30 we had our special dinner in Limericks steakhouse. I had thought about proposing there originally and I'm glad I didn't. When we got in we realized that we didn’t have a private table, we were in a room with maybe 50 other people and seated at a table banquet style. So it would have been kind of awkward. As it was, Andrea was showing her new ring to our table companions and received many nice compliments. The banquet itself was nice, we had a few food options to choose from and I got a huge steak while Andrea had ribs. Both were a little on the dry side but otherwise really good (everything's better when it's free). We sat at a table with three casino hosts and they were conversing mainly with a retired couple who claimed to make their living entirely off of video poker. When they told us they had made over $125,000 last year, we started to wonder if we had gotten this special treatment by mistake! We didn't let on that we were small potatoes compared to these folks; I guess we'll just have to see when my birthday rolls around whether or not we get a similar offer. The "surprise gift" turned out to be a leather (not sure if it's real or not) bag with the Fitz logo on it. It was pretty nice and came in handy for hauling home all the various Vegas crap that I always manage to accumulate on these trips.

Saturday

Saturday morning we had all planned to grab the breakfast buffet at Main Street Station. Like the Peppermill, it has become one place I try to stop at on every trip. Their breakfast steak is always delicious and the omlette guy who prepares it is very entertaining. We soon discovered that Susie and Mike had stayed up very late the previous evening and had gotten steak and eggs at the Golden Gate at 2am so they weren't exactly in the mood for another big meal. We headed over there by ourselves and by the time we got back Mike and Susie were ready for their first taste of the El Cortez. My sister and I love cheap roulette and I had been telling her for the last two years that she needed to go to the El Cortez to experience the cheapest roulette around. The cheapness is only one part of the appeal of course; you really can't match the El Cortez for its weird, gritty atmosphere and its unsavory characters. Play roulette at the El Cortez for a good 30 minutes and you are guaranteed to see quite a few. Drunks throwing chips all over the table, vagrants possibly throwing UP on the table, bitter chain smoking old ladies, and always, ALWAYS, some disheveled guy staring wild eyed at the roulette wheel and frantically scribbling down the winning numbers on a piece of paper. These are the guys who have a Roulette System. They watch it for a few spins and then invariably spread tons of chips all over the board and bust out like everyone else. It never fails. I shouldn’t mock them because it could be me some day. It takes a brave soul to venture down to the El Cortez but unlike, say, the Western or the Gold Spike you aren't creeped out to the point that you want to run screaming for the exits and you’ll always walk away with a good story.

So we head towards the couple of scary blocks separating the El Cortez from the Experience and find a very large parade blocking our path. It's not every day that happens. We did have a flyer in our room informing us there would be a Martin Luther King Day parade on Saturday from 10am to 2pm which to me looked like a typo. How could a parade last for four hours? Well this one didn't, it lasted for five and half! We saw the last remnants of it at 3:30 in the afternoon. Apparently they take MLK day very seriously in Vegas. Either that or they do this for every holiday. Luckily there were lots of breaks in the parade (maybe a reason for the length) and they were letting people cross the street in groups. We get to the 'Tez and all buy in for $20 at roulette. You've got to love 25 cent roulette; where else does a $20 buy in make you look like a millionaire? Andrea and Susie wandered off after a while but Mike and I kept plugging happily along on our twenty bucks. After a while, I came up with my own foolproof Roulette System. I can't give you all the details unless you pay me lots of money but trust me, I've tried many systems at the El Cortez and this one was the best. It basically came down to putting a few chips on just one number that hadn’t come up in a long time and throwing down a few other bets each spin just to cover your losses. Not exactly brain surgery I know but what I had decided was that I was going to absolutely stick with just the one number until it came up. Well it worked… first with 19, then 34, then 20, then 14. Eventually we got the whole table to put chips on the number we were willing to come up. I walked away from the table two hours later with $90. Not bad for a $20 buy in on quarter roulette!

It was a good thing I won it too because my luck took a turn for the worse after we got back to Fitz. I gave most of it right back at the blackjack and Let It Ride tables. I also tried some new gimmicky table game I remember seeing at Fitz last time, I forget the name but it claims to be a Texas Hold'em type game. Its really just Let It Ride in reverse. You get two cards and increase your bet if you want to see the flop. A quick $40 loss convinced me to stay away. I also fufilled a life long dream and finally found out what a deep fried Twinkie tastes like. Mermaids has been advertising them for a couple of years now but I've never had the nerve to try one. I used some of my winnings to buy food at their snack bar for everyone and we soon found they tasted more or less like funnel cakes. Strangely, they bear absolutely no resemblance to the twinkies on the sign out front.

Later that day, we caught the bus to the Strip. Mike has an uncle that works as a bartender at Bally’s and he and Susie planned to visit him later in the evening. Before doing that we walked through Bellagio and saw the current conservatory display, which was a celebration of the Chinese New Year. It was stunning as always. My sister took a few pictures of Andrea and me for our parents and then we went out and grabbed a spot to watch the fountain show. I'd seen bits and pieces of it before but never the whole thing. I was surprised to learn that it was only one song! The song was Frank Sinatra's version of "Luck Be A Lady Tonight" and it was certainly impressive but I always thought it lasted longer.

After this we all agreed we needed some real food. We wanted something good and cheap and quickly realized we were in exactly the wrong part of the strip to find that. After walking through Bally's and Barbary Coast (Barbary Coast has no cheap restaurants??? Who knew?) we ended up at some place in the Flamingo. The prices were still a little high - ten bucks for a Cobb Salad? - but we soon found out that the portions were monstrous! We split a mountain of nachos and none of us managed to finish the salads. After that, we left Susie and Mike to their drinking and took the bus back downtown. Andrea went to the room to take a nap and I decided to wander around Freemont Street taking in the sights. I got one of those monster frozen drinks from La Bayou and walked around enjoying the buzz. I just love being on Freemont Street at night and I wanted to enjoy it one last time on this trip since I knew Sunday night we'd be trying like hell to get home. I lost money at Binions while watching their new singing cowgirl show then headed back to Fitz and lost money while watching the loud cover band play. It was all quite enjoyable until the buzz wore off and I realized how much I had spent. So I took the last $40 I had on me over to the Fitz Let It Ride table for one more go. I expected it to evaporate quickly but apparently my luck had returned. I hit a flush once again, with a side bet which paid out $50 alone! After a nice long session I colored up for a black chip and headed upstairs to bed.

Sunday

Sunday morning we said our goodbyes to Susie and Mike. They had an 11:30am flight back to Boston. We had been able to get a 2pm checkout time which was good because we had another dreaded redeye flight back home at midnight and we wanted as much time as possible to be able to retreat back to our room. After they left went to Molly's Buffet and spent our Fitz card cash back points on a mediocre brunch. There’s another great reason why it's better to go to Vegas during the week. On the weekends you have to pay for "brunch" instead of breakfast, which just means they throw in all the lunch stuff you don’t feel like eating yet with the breakfast stuff and you have to pay extra for it. I had originally wanted to do the Champagne Brunch at the Golden Nugget but the line was out the door and for Downtown it was pretty pricey.

Afterwards, we decided to head back to the El Cortez again to test my Roulette System. But first, I placed my first ever sports bets at the small book inside Fitz. Being the weekend of the NFL Divisional playoffs, I decided I wasn't going to pass up the opportunity to put money on my team, the Patriots. (I was getting tired of the sports media fawning over Payton Manning like they always do; they somehow overlook the fact that the Colts never, ever beat the Pats.) I put $20 on the Pats to win (hey, I'm new at this, taking it slow) and $20 on the Vikings to cover the spread against the Eagles, for the sole reason that I hate the Eagles. We went back over to the El Cortez with my infallible Roulette System in hand and once again enjoyed a long and lucrative run on our $20 buy in. We both cashed out for a healthy profit again and by the time we left the El Cortez the Eagles had pretty much destroyed the Vikings so my first bet was a bust.

We went back to Fitz and I sat down at the Let It Ride table once more since there was a good view of the TV near the bar from there. I bought in with my black chip from the night before and played on it through the entire first half of the Pats - Colts game, I kid you not. At the half, I colored back up with a $10 profit and went upstairs to find Andrea who had been playing the Loose Deuces nickel machine that had treated her so well on our last trip. When we first got to Fitz on Thursday she had made a beeline right to the machine only to find that the bill acceptor wasn’t working properly. During the time we were there, change attendants had to come over almost every time she wanted to play it to get it working again. I know she hopes that machine is well taken care of and is still there on our next visit because she played on her initial $20 throughout the entire football game. I alternated between chatting with her and sitting in the sports lounge watching the Colts fans get more and more depressed. After breaking even on my bets and quickly losing the $38.50 at the Fitz roulette tables (my infallible System only works at the El Cortez apparently) it was time to leave Downtown and begin the final leg of our Las Vegas vacation.

As I mentioned, we were stuck taking the redeye back home again and we did not have happy memories of the experience from the previous trip. We had learned that being Downtown at night time with out a nice quiet hotel room could really suck and made for some bad gambling decisions just to pass the time. When Andrea had played the tournament at the Luxor she also found that the Excalibur runs a poker table with a single $1 blind. We had planned to try and play there with Susie and Mike but had never gotten around to it. We also learned from our previous trip that a cab from the south end of the Strip to the airport only cost ten bucks. So our brilliant idea was, grab all our bags and get on the CAT bus to the Strip. Check our bags at the Tropicana, eat the 2 for 1 burger special at the Trop which we had also enjoyed on our last visit, then play the $1 poker at the Excalibur until it was time to get a cab to the airport. It sounds like a great plan on paper and it might have been perfect if we had left a little earlier. As it was, the evening rush was just beginning so we found ourselves in a standing room only bus clutching our bags like a couple of idiots. The bus crawled through the traffic and we couldn’t get seats until we reached the Sahara. The ride in total took up an hour. So admittedly, it killed some time and stopped us from losing money. After that, things did go smoothly. We checked our bags at the Trop and the bellman went out of his way to help us. We scarfed down our burgers and walked over to Excalibur where I got my first taste of casino poker (sort of anyway, people aren't scared to call a $1 blind no matter what they have). After killing two hours and losing $30 apiece, hey you can lose a lot more in two hours on the Strip, we went back to the Trop and the bellman got us a cab right away.

The rest of the trip I won’t detail here because it involves being really uncomfortable and unable to sleep on the redeye back home, made even worse by the fact that we had to transfer in Pittsburgh at six in the morning, but all that hardly spoiled the trip. To sum it all up, we had a great vacation. It was the perfect amount of time to be in Vegas, we didn’t overextend ourselves or get burnt out. I came back with half my bankroll left and got engaged to the woman I love. What more could you ask for from a vacation?

My first trip to Las Vegas was from Sept. 19th to the 21st of 2001. I had been laid off by AT&T Broadband at the beginning of the summer and given what I realize now was a pretty decent severance package. We all whined about it at the time, but it was enough to prevent me from looking very hard for a job those first few months of unemployment. (It doesn't help that the unemployment started in mid-June, not exactly the time of you want to rush back to work) Anyway, I decided to fulfill a lifelong dream and visit Las Vegas. Looking back on it now, I don't know why I waited as long as I did. I always had this impression that it would be prohibitively expensive. Little did I know, Las Vegas was the perfect town for anyone no matter what your level of income. If you've got money to spend this town will gladly help you spend it.

My sister and I booked the trip through expedia. She wanted to stay at the Stratosphere for some reason, and not knowing enough about the casinos to argue, I agreed. After the trip was booked I discovered cheapovegas.com and bigempire.com. It's safe to say that my life hasn't been the same since. I devoured every bit of info they had in the two months before our trip and I'm damn glad I did. If you're reading this and planning your first trip to Vegas, check cheapovegas.com FIRST for their hotel reviews. Sure they may be pretty lighthearted in nature but I've yet to find one that wasn't accurate.

We left from Boston's Logan Airport on September 19th 2001. As we all remember, on September 11th Logan Airport saw the departure of a couple of flights that brought America to a complete standstill for a few days. All air traffic was suspended for two or three days and Logan was closed for several days longer as the terror attack was investigated. Suddenly our vacation was in limbo, we didn't know if the airport would open again on the 19th and if it did, we didn't really know if we wanted to be on an airplane. I'd like to say that it was determination in the face of adversity that made us go regardless of the events of 9/11. It would be nice to declare that if we were too frightened to go to the land of sin and decadence then the terrorists would have already won. But the truth is, Expedia wasn't going to refund us if we backed out and we weren't going to waste about $500 apiece. Nope, it's not as glamorous but there it is.

So we were there at Logan in the early morning hours of September 19th with National Guardsmen prowling around with M16s or something. Very strange and unnerving thing to see at 5am. We were hardly the only ones a little rattled to be there, I remember getting onto the America West flight and looking at the flight crew and thinking how stressed out they all looked. WE had it easy in comparison. We only had to worry about one flight, these people did it for a living. It's bad enough that they had salary cuts and layoffs to worry about; now they had terrorists flying their workplaces into buildings. I'd like to also note that the in flight movie they showed was the comedy "What's The Worst That Could Happen?". I swear to God.

After the long, non stop flight we landed at McCarran Airport in Vegas. It's got to be just about the coolest airport in the world and you couldn't ask for a better introduction to the city than this place. An airport with slot machines, casino carpeting, chrome and mirrors everywhere? You've gotta love it. It's hard to say if it's a casino-themed airport or an airport-themed casino.


Here's my sister five minutes after landing in Las Vegas

So on to the Stratosphere. The exterior looks pretty cool and Vegas-like, certainly it's dominated images of The Strip for the past several years. And to the unsuspecting, you might think it was in the midst of all the other cool hotels. Sorry folks, it ain't. It's about as far removed from the rest of The Strip as a casino can be and still technically be part of The Strip. It's closest neighbor is the Sahara, which is where we found ourselves gambling when we weren't out exploring the rest of the city.


The interior of the Strat is fairly bland as well. It's a casino alright, with all the usual trappings. But it doesn't look too much different than the Indian casino you might have near you. There's just nothing particularly Vegas-y about it. Even as we were standing in line for check-in, listening to Tom Jones playing over the speakers, I had a hard time convincing myself I was REALLY in Las Vegas at last.

Our next mistake: we ate at the Stratosphere buffet. I don't know if it was 9/11 or budget related or what, but America West had just stopped meal service on its flights, so neither of us had eaten in about ten hours. Like I mentioned earlier, I had done my research before this trip and I had a whole list of great buffets that I wanted to try. The Stratosphere was not on it. But we were hungry and there arent't a lot of options in that area. You can walk down to the Sahara (I've always liked their coffee shop) but other than that there are places that look fairly suspect.

After spending some time (and money) in the Stratosphere casino we decided to venture out. We had seen the Sahara on the shuttle ride over and it looked pretty cool. I fell in love instantly with the Sahara upon entering and it remains one of my favorite places to gamble in Vegas. It might have something to do with the fact that they used to always have $1 blackjack tables open or that I have done better there than anywhere else in town. A big part of it though was that from the moment you walk in you feel like you're in Vegas. Plush carpets, gaudy chandeliers, cocktail waitresses who look like former strippers, and a goofy middle eastern theme that's carried through the whole casino. This is the sort of stuff you come to Las Vegas for. The blackjack tables at the Sahara kept us busy for the rest of the night. We headed back to our room knowing that there was a whole lot more Vegas to see tomorrow.


The "World Famous" Chapel of the Bells near the Stratosphere on the north part of the Strip. Well, it was featured in "Vegas Vacation", does that qualify as "World Famous"?


I awoke at 6am the next day to the sound of my sister leaving the hotel room. She said she was going downstairs to see if she should find some cough drops. I couldn't get back to sleep after that and half an hour later I headed downstairs to see where she'd gotten to. Sure enough, she was sitting at a Monopoly nickel slot! The machine had a messed up screen, I don't know why she chose that one out of the row of machines she had to pick from, but she said she had won over $60 on the five bucks she put into it. (her slot machine luck is like that) For the rest of the trip she kept going back to the machine with the messed up screen although it never paid out that way again. When we went back a year later she looked for it again but couldn't find it. It must have been too lucky and costing the casino too much money. :)

If you're up early in Las Vegas - and if you're from the East Coast chances are you will be - this is a great time to walk down The Strip. There aren't many tourists about, no one will try to solicit you for an "entertainer" or a time share, and you get to see the maintenance crews working up and down the street doing the sorts of things you don't think about. Yes, somebody's got to water all those gorgeous palm trees and pressure wash the wino urine off the sidewalks. So take in that early morning sunshine and be thankful that it ain't you. Just remember, things are ALOT farther apart than they appear in Vegas. While it may SEEM like a simple thing to walk from, say, the Tropicana to the Bellagio, it really isn't. Its something to do with the clarity of that humidity-free desert air along with the huge scale of the buildings themselves.

Giant slot machines mean giant winnings at "Slots A Fun"!! Umm... right?


That first morning we walked from the Stratosphere all the way to The New Frontier, stopping in the Riviera and the Westward Ho along the way. We ended up getting breakfast at the Frontier. I remember they had an omelet bar and I grabbed a handful of jalapeno peppers for mine. I'm pretty sure the Mexican guys behind the grill were laughing at me and I can't blame them. Those suckers were hot, not at all like the jalapeno peppers you get around here. Breakfast at the New Frontier was okay, but little did I know the Peppermill was pretty much right across the street. The Peppermill is the best place in town for breakfast if you ask me, but I wouldn't learn about this well kept secret until our next trip.

The Westward Ho! Come for the HUGE 99 cent margaritas, stay for the... hell, I don't know. They've got some cheap blackjack at least.


I like this part of The Strip. Sure, it's not for everybody. If you want pirates and volcanoes and medieval silliness then you'd better keep walking south. But if you like cheap gambling and you don't mind casinos that are past their prime then this is the area to be in. I know with the ever-increasing expansion in Vegas these places may not be around forever, at least not in the slightly dilapidated form that they are in now. So enjoy it while you can.

After our big breakfast we decided not to walk anymore (we had this foolish idea that we were going to walk the length of the strip) and we grabbed the shuttle and headed down to the far end of the Strip. THIS is the Vegas most people know with its monster hotels and casinos with goofy themes. We stopped into the New York New York, which is admittedly kind of neat. Out front by the Statue of Liberty replica, the strangest thing was happening. A collection of tributes and memorials to those who had died in 9/11 had been spontaneously started by visiting tourists. I guess it grew substantially from what we saw in September of 2001, so much so that it is now a permanent display, but even then there were a surprising number of mementos left by people. The whole thing was very surreal to say the least. Heartfelt and honest, definitely, but why here of all places? It wasn't really New York! It was a big New York themed casino! I really wish I had taken some pictures of this. We also managed to visit the MGM, the Luxor, Excalibur, all places that felt more like theme parks than casinos. We did next to no gambling down here because the table minimums were so much higher. You know this is a great town when you can pass up a $5 blackjack table because it's too expensive. Try even finding a $5 blackjack table anywhere else, let alone one for less. The only place we did gamble in was the Boardwalk, a little casino that was apparently trying to capture the skanky thrill of east coast resorts like Atlantic City and Coney Island. Why you'd want to is anyone's guess but at least I was able to play some $3 blackjack.

AAGGHH!! Big scary clown head!! The Boardwalk is a small hotel/casino which looks out of place among all the monster properties in the south part of the Strip. It's the only place around that has $3 blackjack, though.


After this we were pretty wiped out, you can only walk through so many monster casinos before they all start to look the same. We managed to get up to the Bellagio for their amazing lunch buffet just before they stopped serving. Even though we were right at the tail end of the buffet, all the food was out and it was really fantastic. Well worth the steep price. We wondered around the Bellagio for a bit goggling at all the excessive stuff. It's tough for a place to appear both sophisticated and garish but the Bellagio pulls it off. The conservatory is definitely worth a look.

Inside the swank-tastic Bellagio conservatory.


So later on that night, we headed down to Freemont Street for our first experience of Downtown. Being in Las Vegas and all, we wanted to take in some kind of show, my sister wanted to see The Amazing Jonathan at The Golden Nugget. I figured why not. So we caught the CAT shuttle to downtown which conveniently stops right outside of the Stratosphere. While we were waiting for the bus we were entertained by some local who told us about terrorist plots to blow up the Stratosphere tower. You can always tell the crazy locals, they're usually men of an indeterminate age somewhere between 25 and 50, very thin and tanned as dark as leather wallets so they basically look like walking pieces of beef jerky. They also usually have long beards reminiscent of Yosemite Sam. Maybe I'm over generalizing here. Maybe we just kept running into the same guy over and over again.


Ethereal bikini-clad women welcome you to The Freemont Street Experience. The covered, pedestrian mall portion of Freemont Street has a party atmosphere yet you always feel safe. Venture outside of the pedestrian area though, and you're on your own.


Downtown instantly became my favorite part of Las Vegas. I like my entertainment a little on the sleazy, cheap and dangerous side and Freemont Street gives you plenty of that. Yet you still feel surprisingly safe walking through the pedestrian mall. (If you leave the pedestrian area, well then you're taking your chances) Remember when I said that the South Strip is what people think of when they think of Las Vegas? That may be true but I think in their mind's eye they visualize something like Freemont Street with all those garish neon signs everywhere jumping out at you. This may be due in part to the fact that the Las Vegas that you SEE on TV and in the movies generally IS Freemont Street. Since a few blocks of the area is closed off to traffic, it's a favorite spot for film crews. This is where the real gambling still lives, folks. At least for now. The big corporations seem to have their sites set on Downtown next so enjoy it while you can. Every time someone I know is going to Vegas for the first time I tell them two things: DON'T stay at Circus Circus and DO visit downtown. Usually they ignore me on both counts, the bastards. We didn't hit as many of the Freemont casinos as I would have liked on that first trip and never got to the Golden Gate to experience the 99 cent shrimp cocktail I've heard so much about.

We did get sucked into the evil that is La Bayou. A tiny little casino that lures you in with a pretty girl out front handy out Mardi Gras style beads. You don't have to show your boobies to get em either. Of course THEN she tells you about the free drawing that they'll be holding in "just a few minutes" and gives you a raffle ticket. The drawings are a good half an hour apart by the way. So by this point you're committed to seeing if you're the lucky winner so you sit there playing their incredibly tight nickel slots (slots are all they have, not even any video poker machines). My sister won the drawing once, and got another bead necklace for her trouble. The only good thing about this place is that they serve these huge frozen drinks in containers that look like yard-long test tubes. This counter is conveniently located in the back of the casino. There is another casino directly across the street called Mermaids that pulls the same scam.

A good chuck of our time was spent at the Amazing Jonathan show, unfortunately. Amazing Jonathan isn't really that amazing, and he may not even really be Jonathan for all I know. I guess his act might seem fresh and original if you had somehow managed to not have television in the 1980s. When my sister told me about the guy, the name wasn't familiar to me. She kept describing his stuff as if he was some up and coming comedian that I should know about. When he started doing his act, after a rather lame opening magic act, it suddenly came flooding back. He's basically a cross between a magician and a prop comedian, the two lowest forms of life. I remember seeing him on TV multiple times when I was a teenager. Probably David Letterman or maybe Saturday Night Live. I thought he was pretty cool at the time (but I was a kid and can be forgiven for that). The thing that amazed me was that his act has stayed essentially the same over the course of the last 15 to 20 years. Okay, I'm being a little hard on him I guess. His show isn't BAD. But if you're still doing the exact same jokes for all that time I don't think you can really bill your act as "edgy". Las Vegas isn't really known for it's "edgy" entertainment, I guess his well-worn jokes are as close as you're going to get.


It's 115 degrees and I'm at the Hoover Dam. Who's bright idea was this?



September 21st was a full day for us, we started out by walking down to the Stardust and catching a free shuttle that went all the way down Boulder Highway to Sam's Town Hotel and Casino. We did all this basically so we could have a $2.99 steak and eggs breakfast special and grab the next bus back an hour later. It was pretty good too. I didn't get to see much of the place but I liked what I saw. What I really enjoyed in the brief time I was there was the Atrium. This is a big indoor park for lack of a better word. It has a waterfall, fake trees, animatronics animals and piped in nature sounds. At night they put on a laser show. It all sounds very cheesy but some how it works and its more relaxing than you might think. I knew I wanted to come back again when I had more than the hour we allotted ourselves between shuttle buses, and I ended up having a great stay here a couple of years later.

After that it was on to the Hoover Dam. That's right, our last day in Las Vegas and how do we choose to spend it? By doing something vaguely educational and visiting the Hoover Dam. I have to admit, it was my idea and it seemed like a good one at the time. My logic went this way: I may never get to Las Vegas again (yeah right) and I'd be a fool to pass up seeing one of the greatest feats of modern engineering which was only a half an hour away. So the day before, as we were walking down the Strip, we stopped into a little tourist stand that offered Hoover Dam tours and signed up. What we didn't know at the time was that because of new Sept. 11th security restrictions, tours were no longer allowed INSIDE the dam at all. The guy behind the counter neglected to mention this to us as we forked over our $30 apiece. I think the driver let us know when we were about halfway there and had no choice in the matter. It was at least 100 degrees every day we were there, so we were delighted to hear that the Hoover Dam site averaged about 10 degrees HOTTER than Las Vegas. Our driver told us it was roughly 115 when we arrived. Dry heat or no, 115 is DAMN hot. We spent a good part of the time cowering in the gift shop, which was probably part of their plan. So basically, our three choices were the gift shop, the shadow of the parking garage, or walking around the top of the dam with no tour guide. We did a little of each but spent most of the time wondering when we were heading back. The driver was a decent guy with seemingly inexhaustible supply of Vegas knowledge, on the drive back he pointed out various sites of interest like the famous "Welcome To Las Vegas" sign (which is really a good distance down the Strip past Mandalay Bay. Unless you're driving you'd never see it at all.) and Wayne Newton's massive estate.

Illiterates with booze and guns not welcome here. Possibly my favorite sign of the trip. It made the trip to Hoover Dam worthwhile. Almost.



Later that evening we hit a few more of the north strip locations. We were taking the red eye flight back home so we had substantial time to kill. Even though it looked foreboding, we decided to check out Circus Circus. There is just nothing nice I can say about this place. Sure, if you have kids it's one of the few places in town with enough stuff to keep them distracted while you feed your gambling addiction. But that's just not a good reason in my book. Stay somewhere else and drop em off at Circus Circus in the morning, that's what I say. The place stinks like 30 plus years of stale cigarettes. I'd always liked the James Bond movie "Diamonds Are Forever" when I was younger and I always though the scene in Circus Circus was cool. It's also featured in "Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas" although the name was changed to Bazooko's Circus. Both movies show the circus acts being performed being performed right above the gaming floor. Maybe it was that way in the early 70's when those movies took place but it's a much more typical layout now. The lame circus acts are performed in a different area from the gaming, I guess this is to keep kids and gambling separate. They're not performed above anything interesting that I could remember, so there's no danger of falling acrobats. Anyway, the whole place is old and lame and smelly and depressing. Clowns and gambling do not go together.

Spanky The Evil Circus Circus Clown says: "Send more children! The last ones were delicious!"



It was getting on towards the time that we would have to bid our sad goodbyes to this fair city and head towards the airport. But there was time enough for one more strange event. We stopped into the Rivera again for some more gambling and my sister decided to go for their $40 of slot play for $20 gimmick. Most people will tell you this is a bad bet. For $20 you get 40 credits on a section of "special" $1 slot machines. They DON'T pay out in cash. If you get a certain amount of credits, you get a prize. Usually something cheesy with the Riviera name all over it. Normally, you last long enough to get one cheap prize, so that "free" prize essentially costs you $20. However, Susie, with her strange slot machine luck, could NOT lose. She must have been on that machine for over and hour with no sign of stopping. She racked up hundreds of credits. They ran out of free crap to give her. I kept checking back in on her and she was still there. Eventually I told her we HAD to leave because we had to get our stuff together and head to the airport. Eventually she had no choice, she offered her machine to one of the other contestants who had been wiped out of her $20 and we left. The sad thing is, even though she won all those credits she got no more than a few pieces of free crap for her efforts.

Rushing her to the airport probably wasn't necessary in retrospect. Even though this was a week or so after 9/11 and you were advised to arrive at the airport in the neighborhood of two plus hours before your flight, McCarran International Airport really had their stuff together. I'm not exactly a world traveller. I've been in no more than eight different airports in my lifetime. But I've flown out of Boston and Philadelphia enough to know how badly air travel can suck. The people at both those airports could learn a thing or two from McCarran because they really know how to move people efficiently. We were through security in no time. And even though in the days after 9/11 where everyone was just winging it since there was no new security policy in place; we felt like they had done everything they could to make sure the travellers were secure. Fly out of Philadelphia International even now in 2005 and tell me how safe you feel. It's just one more reason to love Las Vegas. And as I sat in that plane during takeoff, watching the glittering city shrink away into the blackness of the desert, I knew I would be back. Oh yes, I would be back