Vegas Trip Report

We had a great four days in Las Vegas, and as usual, we didn't spend much time sitting around. I have no idea how far we walked, but it was easily measured in miles. Our home for this trip was the Flamingo Hotel, the first major hotel to be built in Las Vegas and the "mother church" if you will of the hotel/casino industry that sprang up in that town. It was built by mobster Bugsy Seigel, and there is still a monument to Bugsy on the spot where the original hotel stood (it's now a garden area). Here's a shot of the hotel at night.

The grounds are very nice with some 15 acres of pools and gardens. We had our obligatory photo taken by one of the waterfalls where a lot of weddings take place.

During the course of our trip, we visited a lot of properties. Let me see if I can remember them all: Flamingo, Bally's, Paris Las Vegas, Aladdin, MGM Grand, New York/New York, Excalibur, Luxor, Mandalay Bay, Bellagio, Caesers Palace, Mirage, Treasure Island, Venetian, Green Valley Ranch, and the Wynn's Resort. We also stopped at M&M's World for some fresh peanut M&Ms, and the Fashion Show Mall. We shopped 'til we dropped.

There is tremendous growth going on in Las Vegas right now with high rise residential towers sprouting up everywhere. One thing for sure, just because something was there last time doesn't mean it will be there the next time. On Friday night we were debating where to eat, and after walking all the way down to New York/New York, we decided instead to walk all the way back to Caesers and eat at the Bertolini's in the center of the Forum shops. We've eaten there before, and the atmosphere and food were great. We walked approximately 1.25 miles back to Caesers...only to discover that the restaurant wasn't there anymore. We ended up at the Planet Hollywood.

This happened to us a lot over the weekend as many of the properties have undergone significant changes just in the last year since we've been there. The MGM Grand has completely redone one of their large slot areas and made it into a poker room, and the Venetian is changing their St. Mark's Square area and adding three more restaurants. Frankly, I think it takes away a lot of the charm of the area and will make it much more crowded and less like the square for which it is named.

One thing you just can't get away from in Vegas are the people who constantly acost you with offers of shows and dinners if you'll just come and listen to their time share pitch. They're everywhere and we spent a great deal of time just saying "no thanks".

One of our favorite places to visit is the conservatory at Bellagio's. It's always equisitely decorated in seasonal colors and themes, and here are a couple of shots of the fall scheme currently on display:

In this picture you'll see a live Banyan tree (that's only one tree you're looking at) that was transplanted from Florida to the Bellagio.

I was having a little fun with the camera on this trip, trying to capture some of the nighttime scenes. This is one of my favorite shots of Bally's and the Eiffel Tower from Paris Las Vegas which is right next door.

During our wanderings on Sunday we stopped by the Mirage where the memory of Siegfried and Roy is still quite strong, even though the pair is no longer performing. One of the white tigers was on display, and here he is playing "let's pretend the rock is Roy".

A couple of other notes. In California you can't smoke indoors in public buildings, which is not true in Nevada, and in the past you'd open the door to a hotel/casino and get smacked in the face with smoky air and your clothes would reek by the end of the stay. For some reason, I didn't notice it near as much this year. Either there are fewer people smoking, or the properties are doing a much better job of exchanging the inside air. It was a nice change.

Another thing we noticed in every casino we walked through was a new game - the SuperSpin Wheel of Fortune. Wheel has been a popular casino game for years. It seems those machines are always busy and active, and I'm sure they make the casinos a bunch of money. This new machine is huge. It has a large horizontal wheel in the center (probably 6 feet across) with nine player stations located around it. Instead of single seats at each station, it has a double seat so two people can play together. The game features video of Pat Sajak and Vanna White, and if you get a "bonus" (which happens reasonably frequently), you're involved the next time the big wheel spins. Whatever bonus amount lines up with your station is what you win. I must admit that we invested a few nickels in that one and had fun playing it (we broke even, which is almost the same as a win in Vegas).

We've been going over there every year since 2000 and it's funny how quickly the technology has changed. When we first were going over there the machines did not have bill accepters and in order to play you had to buy coin rolls from the cage and feed them in one at a time. If you won and cashed out, the coins would dump in the tray which was engineered to make as much noise as possible to add to the excitement. I had a friend who had never been in a casino before, so he loaded up a whole roll of coins and then hit the cash out button just so it would sound like he hit a big jackpot.

Just a few years later, none of the new machines will accept coins at all, and none of them will pay out coins. If you cash out the machine makes an electronic noise that sounds like coins dropping, but in fact it's just spitting out a ticket which can then be put into another machine or into an ATM-like cash dispenser to get your winnings. The days of walking around with a big bucket of coins is over (as are the free logo coin buckets that we collected from every place we passed in 2000. I think we came home with 20 of them).

It was a lot of fun, though both of us are a little stiff and sore from all the walking. We didn't prepare for the trip as well as we should have. We'll know better next time.