There’s something about sleeping in Las Vegas hotels that’s different from everywhere else in the world. Yes, I know we’ve travelled back 8 hours and you expect some disruption, but I remain convinced that the air conditioning in Vegas hotels isn’t' “normal” and is contrived to wake you early each day, surely in the hope that you’ll gamble your life away downstairs in the casino. Enough people do, that’s for sure.
Sure enough, we were both awake at 5am in good time to watch the sun rise over the distant mountains. Vegas is such a strange place – a vast, sprawling town set literally in the middle of the desert. Now developed, you can see many reasons for its continued prosperity. It’s just strange to think what must have happened to have caused it to develop in the first place – surely it was easier for it not to have happened?
Thankfully, we managed to sleep some more and we took a late lunch at the hotel’s MGM Grand Buffet. Hotel buffets in Vegas hotels defy description: their scale, in terms of tables and vast quantities of food spread over such a large area, mirrors Vegas itself. Despite plenty of other choices (hotels typically have ten or more restaurants within them), the buffets are always aggressively priced (set price of $15 is typical for any meal, including drinks). And the food is normally better than OK – nothing exceptional, but certainly good value and quite acceptable.
Our first trip on the Las Vegas Monorail took us to the Venetian Hotel. The Venetian is surely one of Vegas’ smartest hotels – the decoration is simply impeccable – this example is the huge ceiling painting above the escalators.
The Venice theme has no apparent limits. An artificial sky is complemented by an indoor canal, complete with gondola rides (expensive, but with no shortage of takers – just like the real Venice).
By this time, I was very weary but Vicky manage to coerce me in to Jimmy Choo’s (they’re wonderful shoes, apparently) before we collapsed over a coffee (or Diet Pepsi, for the less sophisticated of us).
In a last-ditch attempt to wake myself up, I went on the New York-New York rollercoaster. Afterwards, we headed back to the MGM and were surprised to find the Lion Habitat on show within the hotel. Is it right to keep animals in a hotel? We thought not, but apparently they are kept outside of Vegas and brought in each day. I’m still not sure that makes it any more ‘right’, but it certainly pulls in the crowds.
Still in the fabled ‘corridor’, we struggled on to dinner a the Grand Wok in the hotel, before heading back to the Venetian for a performance by the Blue Man Group. We’d both seen their show when it was on a couple of years ago back in London.
Truthfully, we both thought the show was a little below their (high) London standards, and might have been lost on the unappreciative and unresponsive American audience. What made the night for us was, having managed to avoid being selected for any audience participation in the show, we had the opportunity to meet with a ‘Blue Man’ after the show. Vicky even got a little blue paint on her nose for her efforts.
After leaving the Blue Man, we had a quick look into the ballroom at the Venetian. As regular blog-readers will know, this is where the famous “Monster night” took place in January 2007 and I took a photo of the room whilst we were there. It looks big here, but it felt a 1,000 times bigger when I was making an impromptu speech bin front of the gathered audience on that night last year.
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