The Mirage

What an appropriate name for the hotel I was staying in a city that is based on a concept that is mirage-like in nature.  It’s been 3 days now since I left Vegas and am still having trouble putting it into words.  The question asked the most of me since I got back was “Did you enjoy it?”  The answer is “Yes, but I would probably enjoy it more were I actually a gambler”.  I can’t believe they tried to make this place family-friendly for a few years.  What a misguided attempt at reshaping a city that is for adults.

Below is a partial recap of the memorable events.  Since most of the readers of this blog have been to Vegas multiple times, I will mention specific sites to give you an idea of where we were on the Strip.

Thursday

I arrived in Vegas in the early evening and the winds buffeted our 747 as if it were a propeller plane.  For Thursday and Friday, the winds easily exceeded 35-40 mph, creating dustclouds and forcing us to squint a lot.  It was like being in Chicago but without the skyscrapers and waterfront.  Vegas is surrounded by beautiful desert mountains although I’m sure no one pays attention to them as they leave the plane with tunnel vision of riches that lay ahead.  As I leave the airport and head to the taxi line, I notice that it snakes back and forth 6 times like a Disney line.  I’m an avid walker, generally walking a few miles a day, but this line was way too long for any unhealthy or elderly person to navigate.  When it’s 100 degrees and you’re forcing elderly people to walk for quite a distance, there have had to be many incidents that have required an ambulance.  Of course, there were the younger, lazy adults who would leave their baggage in the middle underneath the ropes, navigate another lap within the maze, and move their luggage under the next set of ropes.

The 3 people I’m supposed to meet got in 4 hours earlier than me and are already 3 sheets to the wind so I’m already behind the ball in terms of blood alcohol level.  The first order of business is food, and what do you do in Vegas?  You try buffets.  The one inside the Mirage, Cravings, was everything I expected a Vegas buffet to be.  If you had a hankering for bacon, sushi, crab legs, noodles, and then a slice of prime rib, a Vegas buffet is right up your alley.  It’s everything that’s right and wrong with America.  Land of the plentiful but also home to the gluttonous.  It’s also a great place to either quench the Drunk Munchies or to provide a nice base for the alcohol in your very near future.

After letting one of the group puke the insane amount of alcohol he had ingested, the other 2 guys and I head out to show me part of the town.  The Mirage is in the middle of the Strip, so we took a cab to Excalibur, then took the tram from there to Mandalay Bay – the southernmost hotel on the Strip.  From there we navigated through Mandalay Bay to the Luxor to Excalibur to New York New York.  New York New York was where I began my Getting Drinks Simply By Standing Next To My Craps-Playing Friends.  When you don’t gamble much like me, it’s really the only way to come out semi-ahead in Vegas.  I will give my friends credit, when I left Sunday they were already up quite a bit from a weekend of successful craps playing, including fucking one guy over who kept betting against them.  They made him lose several thousand bucks in the course of less than an hour.

One thing to note – what impressed me was the unbelievably large lobbies/main floors of each hotel.  I’m a “big city boy” but nothing can prepare you for the size of the main floors/basements.  Add the gaming rooms plus the main attractions/shops plus restaurants/bars/buffets and you have enough square footage in each hotel casino to hold several football fields in each one.  The revenue these places must get per square foot has got to be higher than most places on this planet.  I’m sure these places have to replace their bill counters every month or so from overuse.

The night ended with us walking past the Bellagio and into Caesar’s Palace when all the shops were closed.  As if Vegas weren’t surreal enough, walking through the shopping area inside Caesar’s when most of the lights are off and the overhead sky/clouds mural is muted is an experience.  It would have been more interesting had I been able to get My Buzz on, but the 5 pounds of food I had at the Mirage buffet prevented that from happening.

More to come the next few days, including one of the most indulgent meals I’ve had, evacuating from the city’s tallest building, drinking with bikers and standing underneath sleeping lions.