Category: Family

Here’s a nice shot of part of the Luxor pool complex:

I went for a splash yesterday, and quickly found the lack of shade to be murderous 🙂

Today we left Vegas for part two of our 3-state trip. We rented a car at the hotel, but the first one they gave us (an Elantra) had a tire warning light on the dash. A quick call got us a free upgrade to the only car they had left, a mustang:

And so we hit the road on a five hour drive east. At first the landscape (east of Vegas near the Hoover dam) was rocky and mountainous (and almost without plants!) but as we entered Arizona it became a flat featureless desert with scrubby plants and the occasional cactus for miles and miles.

The drive went quickly, with only a single brief stop in the first three hours. And then we needed food badly, and when we finally spied some Golden Arches from a mile or so away it was like the Star of David over the desert!

Less than an hour later we reached our destination: the Grand Hotel in Tusayan, just five miles south of the Grand Canyon! This town is tiny and obviously 100% tourist oriented. We’re here at peak season as well, which means this is the most I’ve ever paid for a hotel room! And here it is:

After checking in we headed up the road to the canyon visitors center, slowing briefly to pass some mule deer…

…but very shortly after we arrived a very powerful storm blew in and sent us (and the zillion other tourists) scurrying. Getting back to our car got us very wet 🙂

Turns out it rains in the afternoon every day here (more or less), so we’re having an early night and will head to the canyon in the early morning. I’m looking forward to this quite a bit!

It’s significantly cooler here than Vegas, with temperatures in the low 60s right now. Tusayan is at an elevation of 6500 feet and is the last stop (for lodging and food) before the canyon.

The thunder and lighting before the rains came was impressive, especially for Bernard since he almost never sees rain at home. He’s certainly seen enough today to last a while…

Don’t worry, we ate better than McDonald’s for dinner. We splurged on Wendy’s 🙂

It’s very early Saturday morning. I’m
ruined after another long day yesterday spent in casinos, and simply not enough sleep. I need a vacation!!

That’s one of many Egypt-themed displays inside this mega hotel. As with everything Luxor, it’s big and over the top.

Yesterday included a dip in the pool (for me) which was brief due to the extreme lack of shade, many hours of slots in six different casinos, an afternoon ‘power nap’ and a showgirl performance in the evening (which was great).

The above shows a car as jackpot prize for a group of 2 cent slots. These may seem a handsome reward, until you notice many other machines have jackpots of over $1.5 million 🙂

Of course you’d be more likely (as Bernard said) to be simultaneously hit by lightning and a meteor than actually winning a mega jackpot but it’s fun to imagine that next button press may be it!

Bernard won a couple of modest (~$100) jackpots yesterday. However it was my day for the winners streak. Although the profits were small, almost every time I put money in a machine I got more out 🙂

What are we eating? Mostly fast food, although we ate at a restaurant yesterday. Needless to say food is expensive here (drinks even more), but there’s also many options so it’s easy to find something.

Today we leave Vegas for our next destination about five hours to the east. I wonder what we’re going to see on our journey?

Ok let me think. My flight was delayed over 2 hours yesterday, and then the flight itself was a nightmare five hours of near turbulence. And then I left my beloved hat either on the plane or in the taxi I took to my hotel.

Suffice to say the trip started off rough. Happily, it’s been all uphill from there!

Here’s our hotel last night:

And here’s a daytime view, taken from outside my room window (we’re in the ‘towers’ next to the pyramid):

The rooms are large and comfy. Incredible value actually, since they were relatively inexpensive:

Here’s a shot inside the pyramid, looking down from a balcony on the 15th floor:

It’s big and bold and full of shops and gambling and restaurants and many other things. It’s also like a mini city, absolutely loaded with people, not surprising since it has over 4000 rooms! What a strange place 🙂

Of course one of – if not *the* – biggest draws in Vegas is gambling. You can start literally the minute you get off your plane, but the big destinations are the mega casinos inside the mega hotels on ‘the strip’ (aka. Las Vegas Blvd). Today, our first full day, we visited about a dozen of them.

I’ll get to the gambling in a moment, but first some shots of the strip itself and a few things we saw today.

Here’s the casino Paris, complete with mini Eiffel Tower:

And here’s New York New York, which models it’s hotel after the NYC skyline:

Inside I found some chocolate:

And Liberace’s car:

Many of the casinos are linked by tunnels or bridges or even a monorail, but since we visited so many we spent quite a big of time outdoors. This meant the direct Vegas sun, which was probably bad since…
A) Neither of us wore hats, and
B) Neither of us put on sunscreen.
I reckon we’ll be paying for this tomorrow!

Anyway much of today was spent in casinos playing ‘the pokies’ (slot machines). Yesterday we formed a syndicate and essentially doubled our buy-in money in minutes. Today the profits were spent leaving – eventually – this in the syndicate till:

So in the end our syndicate broke even and lasted < 24 hours. As far as pokies are concerned, that's a good result isn't it? Well for mortals maybe, but not for gamblers that appear to have The Devil's own luck. As evidence, see this:

And these winnings didn’t follow large losses. No my friends, he was winning big on tiny losses. Much of the above is profit. And it continued all day, casino after casino. And the amounts got even bigger. Take this post-dinner result:

It’s madness! Bernard seemed to have the magic touch today, and couldn’t lose. He goes to sleep several hundred dollars ‘up’. If only the syndicate had been so successful 😉

Tomorrow we’ll visit the massive hotel pool, go shopping in the evening and – let’s be honest – there’ll be more gambling. With a total net loss of $0.70 on $200 bet I think I’m done, but I get a real kick out of watching Bernard fleece the casinos via their ultra-high-tech machines. Let’s all cross our fingers his luck continues for at least a few days more 🙂