The drive from San Diego, CA to Las Vegas, NV is an easy 350 miles. If you hit L.A. at some point not considered rush hour, it takes less than 5 hours from starting the car to getting your room key. For this trip, we stayed at The Luxor. If you aren’t familiar with Vegas, it’s the casino that looks like a pyramid at the very south end of the strip next to Mandalay Bay and across from The Tropicana. I think after this trip, I appreciated every other hotel/casino besides The Luxor. Forgetting about the twenty-minute walk from self-parking to the casino, and another ten minutes trying to find the lobby (it’s that confusing), we waited to check in for approximately a half-hour.
I must say though, you gotta hand it to Vegas for being sneaky. We chose this particular hotel because of the incentives: a thirty dollar dining credit, two-for-one buffet, free upgrade to a newly remodeled suite, and some other shit (maybe ten bucks off spa admission, or something). Well, the dining voucher was only good at three restaurants, each of which averaged entrees in excess of thirty bones. Whatever. We chose the steak house. I got a delicious filet and a cappucino. The bill? It was $129.90. At least it was good. The buffet sucked more than the free Tutankhamen exhibit. A few pointers: Cici’s is the only buffet-style pizza you should ever try, just because it looks like meat doesn’t mean anything, chinese food is usually a good choice at a buffet, unless it’s a shitty cheap one, then the food is overcooked (or undercooked), and finally, I think you are supposed to tip you server in the buffet. These are the Asian women who bring you so-da and clean up your thirty plates of crap you didn’t eat. Anyways, the room was ok. Showers in Vegas are always amazing. You’d think with all the water and electricity the city uses, there would be more than just a little placard next to the lights and water reminding guests to conserve natural resources. Or maybe you wouldn’t. In any event, the showers kick ass. I just let them run 24/7, even when I’m gambling down in the casino because they are that good. As far as the casino goes, The Luxor has got to be the most ill-planned casino ever. I couldn’t tell where I was in relation to the tables, the cage, or even the bar, half the time. It was ridiculous.
I would have to say the highlight of my trip, besides loosing 500 bucks to the slots, and watching Melissa win big jackpots like clockwork, would have to have been visiting the other casinos. I have now been to almost every casino on the strips and a few off, like The Palms. My favorites so far are The Wynn, Caesar’s, The Bellagio, and The MGM Grand. When I get some real money, I think one of these will be the place to stay. On a budget, I don’t think you can been New York, New York or Aladdin. Another other really exciting thing we did in Las Vegas was going to see The Fremont Street Experience. The Fremont Street experience is four city blocks covered by a canopy of LEDs. Basically, it’s a most intense lightshow. A better way to describe it would be to image a giant TV suspended above, that plays a program every hour in the evening for about ten minutes. It’s kind of surreal because all the casinos on Fremont, like Binions, turns off their outside lighting for this crazy show. We saw an alien attack. It was cool, but of course I went to see how you spend $17 million on a tv that is 90 feet wide and 1,400 feet long.
Posted by Sean 
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