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Day 2: Wednesday 18th April First impressions; Vegas is big! If you live in England it is like nothing you have ever seen before, all the roads are dead straight and often go off into the distance as far as the eye can see. And what roads! The one outside our hotel was as wide as the M1, it took about a minute just to walk across it. And because everything is so big you find your depth perception is way out, you would think a building is a few minutes walk away and it takes you half an hour to get there. So, combine this disorientation with lack of sleep and lack of oxygen (Vegas is 2000 feet above sea level) and mix in a pinch of jet-lag and the end result was I felt really ill and wanted to go home. 
By 6.30 in the morning we both realised that we weren't going to get any more sleep so we got up and had an early breakfast. We didn't expect Ashley to surface any time in the near future so we hopped in a cab that took us down-town to the Clark County Courthouse where we needed to buy a marriage licence. This done, we caught a cab back to the hotel to rouse Ashley. The afternoon was spent checking out a huge shopping-mall called Belz just outside town. We used this as a perfect opportunity to fully acquaint ourselves with American dollars by spending loads of them on such necessities as CDs, videos, DVDs, clothes, and tacky Las Vegas merchandise. After a good session of retail therapy we went back to the hotel to freshen up ready to experience the Strip. The Strip is where most of the big hotels are situated, and by big we mean up to 5000 rooms! From one end to the other it is roughly 5 miles long and has a bus service running up and down the length of it 24 hours a day. It is still quite impressive during daylight hours, but at night it just becomes unreal. A few of the big hotels have some form of free entertainment outside to entice people in, the most outrageous of which is Treasure Island that boasts a moat where a pirate ship does battle with a British Frigate every hour and a half, but more about that on Friday. What we did see that evening was a beautiful fountain display outside the Bellagio. This is one of the most expensive hotels on the Strip and because of this, when they were deciding what to have outside the hotel the owners chose to have a fountain display because water is the most precious commodity in the desert and by wasting it in such a fashion showed they could afford it. Or so rumour has it. 
Part of the street was closed off to pedestrians because there was filming going on, so rather than crossing the road we opted to go through the Bellagio, our first experience of a large Vegas hotel. It is impossible to just "pop-in" to a big hotel on the Strip, it often takes five minutes just to walk from the road to the entrance. The Bellagio is no exception, and to get into the hotel proper we had to walk past a row of shops that sold items so expensive that many of them did not have prices on them (if you have to ask, you can't afford it!). Eventually we made it into the hotel, the ground floor of which was taken up with a casino, as were most of the hotels we visited. This was the first time I had ever been inside a casino and, unsurprisingly, it was exactly like you would expect. As well as hundreds of slot machines there were tuxedo wearing croupiers running games of cards and roulette tables. We had a good look round and then made our way back out onto the Strip. 
Our main task of the evening was to go to the Luxor hotel to book tickets for their show, the Blue Man Group. All the big hotels have a show of some kind, magicians or singers, but Blue Man Group was the one that appealed to us most (they are they guys with blue heads on the new Intel Pentium 4 adverts). Because the Luxor is where we were staying on our wedding night it was also a good chance to have a look round the hotel to see what else was going on there. I cannot even begin to describe how magnificent the Luxor really is. The main hotel is a giant black pyramid with an incredibly powerful spotlight that shoots straight up into the night sky and can be seen from miles around. Guarding the entrance to the hotel is a 30 foot replica of the Sphinx (complete with nose) that you have to walk under to get to the main doors. Once inside, the lobby is immense, and all around are huge Egyptian statues. Looking up you could see right to the tip of the pyramid, it was like being on the set of the film Stargate! We had a good look around the ground floor, mainly because we couldn't find the ticket office, and booked tickets for the Friday night performance. None of us had eaten for hours so we opted to eat at the Luxor's buffet. Buffet culture is alive and well in Vegas, a lot of places offer them, not only the hotels. The one at the Luxor was a bit expensive at $15 a head but they had a large range of food and the price included endless re-fills of soft drinks. The buffet room was downstairs and was themed like an archeological dig. This was one of the main things we liked about the hotel was all the attention to detail, even the rest rooms had an Egyptian theme. After stuffing ourselves silly we hired a cab to take us back to our hotel. Ashley and I hung around the bar and played some slots for a while before we eventually dragged ourselves off to bed to get some rest. |
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