The Vegas Days

We are now heading out of Las Vegas after three very busy days and nights – bit of an understatement.
We were staying at the Imperial Palace Hotel, one of the older hotels on “The Strip”, which is now totally surrounded by much newer and bigger hotels which dwarf it completely. Hotel is showing signs of its age compared to the majority of the magnificent new shiny hotels and casino’s artound it, but it was very busy as the rooms were cheap by comparison, and as the man said, all you need is somewhere to lie down at night !! No need to pay a fortune. Our saving grace was being with a group as our courier had us checked in at the toot, compared to the poor individuals who were queuing for hours in a long check in queue – which seemed to be busy from about 7 a.m., till 11pm, and if you rang for the front desk, there was no chance of getting an answer.
Sunday night when we arrived it was a mild 104F – and it only crept up to 108 F on Monday, although if you were by the swimming pool it was even hotter. We headed out onto “The Strip” which was just heaving with folks, all out to spend money whether they wanted to or not.
The normal population of the City is around Four million, the majority who are employed in the service / leisure industry, and from the variety of ages working in the casinos, hotels, etc, there was no shortage of work, but possibly a shortage of labour.
In reality there is no way at all that I can, by writing, describe fully what this place is like, how big, how busy or how hot, it is something which really has to be experienced - seen to be believed.
This City is a Multi $Billion dollar set up, no expense has been spared on some of these wonderful hotels, luxurious, fantastically decorated, the facility to shop till you drop or go bankrupt, and no matter how much money one has, there is someone with even more round the corner.
The City is built in the Mojave desert, obviously originally around some wells, and everything just spreads out from the main Boulevard, into desert and then out to the mountains, without water or electricity it would die again.
Hotels, as seen on adverts all over the World, Ceasers Palace; Hooters; Sands; Venetian; Luxor; MGM Grand; Colesseum; Treasure Island; Mandalay Bay ( with its own artificial beach); Excaliber; New York New York; Monte Carlo; Aria; The Mirage; Flamingo – and so the list goes on.
At one end of the strip the three interlinked hotels, Mandalay Bay, Luxor and Colosseum have over 30,000 rooms available at any one time !!!!!!!
Obviously in a few days it is impossible to see everything of everything, but we walked / meandered for over eight hours through these hotels, used the monorail tram system, and even had our own coach take us on a tour of the full length of The Strip. The only way to keep cool was to walk through the hotels, casinos and malls which were all air conditioned, and many interlinked so it was possible to cover a lot of ground in the relative cool of the interiors. Mind boggling is an apt description of many of these places, and even the fact that people were gambling 24 /7, fed on an enriched oxygen mixture , loud music, and jingling machines – ears were still ringing when we went to bed.
No water or coffee machines in the rooms here, you buy everything, at premium rates, no freebies, the name of the game was to remove as much money from the client as quickly and smoothly as possible.
For good entertainment this has to be one of the best places in the world, with top shows taking place nightly, and during the day in nearly every big hotel. Tom Jones was in the MGM Grand, Cirque Cirque, The Phantom, Cher and so on Galleries of all descriptions.
More later