James Went To Las Vegas

I’ve never really been that bothered about going to Las Vegas.

Well, maybe when I used to play a lot of online poker, say 15 years ago, but that was more the dream of qualifying for a major poker tournament in Las Vegas, than actually going to the place.

I always had it in my mind as a bit pretentious, a bit fake-glam – and that isn’t me. If I’m going out to a bar, then I’ll always choose a graffitied shithole, over an Instagrammy glam bar. And the same applies to my holidays – they are booked in places like Albania and Serbia, instead of Monaco and…well…other glam places.

Our plan was basically to use up our British Airways vouchers before they go bankrupt, to use up holiday allowance before year-end and also to get some sunshine after that miserable summer of 2021 – at least in London and the south-east it was.

Our first idea was Barbados to go watch England play cricket, but this was scuppered by flight and especially hotel prices being way higher than normal. Plus we are back to being shit at cricket nowadays. We looked at other Caribbean islands but the covid rules were too harsh – many wanting masks outside and you know my opinion on that – St Lucia even had an 8pm curfew. WTF?

Then we looked at Miami – we got further with this, flights were a reasonable £420 including bags, but hotels were again ridiculous, costing more than twice as much in March as in June…and the more we looked, the more prices edged up. Eventually, I gave up and decided to strike that off the list.

Then my sister said, “Vegas lol”.

Because Vegas.

I was up for Vegas. Why not? Hotels were super cheap, at least Monday to Wednesday – so cheap that we could have a room each and still be paying much less than a shared room in Miami. Flights were slightly more expensive, I think we paid around £620 to go to Vegas and come back from San Diego. Yeah, there was no way that I was spending a whole week in Las Vegas.

All we needed to do now was apply for an ESTA, get travel insurance, upload covid vaccination status, complete an attestation, work out what the hell tests we needed and then not get covid. Ahhh.

3 weeks later, we were in the air, eating shit plane food. Woohoo! Holidays are back!

Yeah…peas. Hidden peas. And this wasn’t the worst meal of the holiday.

By time we arrived in Las Vegas, it was the British equivalent of 3am, and then we spent around 1+ hours in a queue for immigration. The joys. But then we got in our cannabis-sponsored taxi (hi mum), got to our hotel, dumped our bags and went for a beer or two, including a long walk around The Venetian, before settling into our hotel bar for some more people watching.

The next morning I was tired, but totally motivated to go and enjoy Las Vegas. One thing I learnt about Las Vegas on the first day was that everywhere takes far longer to walk to than you expect. You can see a hotel not far away, but by time you’ve been directed over the overpass, through an array of 100 casino tables, down an ever-lasting alley of Gucci shops, past some fountains and gawped at some showgirls, then your 20 minute walk on Google Maps has taken an hour. And then we had to queue 40 minutes for Eggslut.

Basically a hipster MacDonald’s breakfast. Over-hyped but I still loved the gooey goodness.

Thankfully, I’d found a place just over the road called Beer Park, which does exactly what you’d expect, and we settled in to have a few beers in the midday sunshine. I said that my first beer in the sunshine was going to be glorious. I didn’t expect that it would be this glorious.

We continued with our “must do things” spirit and ended up going to the Neon Graveyard which was to the north of the strip in slightly less salubrious surroundings, then back to our hotel which happened to have a big wheel – and we went on the wheel. Which then left us with 45 minutes to get to our booking at a steak restaurant in New York New York Hotel, which was only 25 minutes walk away…and of course we were late.

For some reason I decided it was a wise idea to spend £40 on a small bottle of vodka and £6 on a huge slice of cake to take back to my room – the sugar high meant that I managed a grand total of 2-3 hours sleep. I know you are supposed to not sleep in Vegas but I’m in my 40’s. I do need to sleep.

Vegas. Baby.

The next day we pretty much tossed a coin between breakfast at The Parisian or The Wynn. And wow – huevas rancheros at The Wynn was one of the best meals of my life. You know when you purposefully eat as slow as possible just because it is so good? Even the coriander leaves added to the perfection and I don’t normally enjoy coriander, at least in leaf format.

The Wynn itself is quite a fabulous-looking hotel, albeit a tad on the pretentious side with way too many designer shops. The restaurant we were in overlooked the swimming pool – a view I was very content with. Though not as much as that meal. Maybe one of the best meals of my life is overdoing it, but it was sensational.

After a short nap, we went to a brewery in the Arts District to meet one of my Roast Dinners In London followers and his wife, who are both Anglophiles and it was really interesting to hear the perspective of people who actually live in Las Vegas.

We didn’t actually have a plan, but we ended up in the old part of Las Vegas, Fremont Street, which is actually much closer to reality – you know, real people, none of this pretentious stuff and actually a lot of fun. Some people would hate it, especially those who prefer the nicer, glammer side of life – but as I mentioned earlier, I like a dive.

I had a fairly crap steak, but the meal was $12 as opposed to the $120 from the night before…oh…and peas. AGAIN. I think I was too drunk to have much influence over what happened by this point, and we somehow managed to get 3 exact numbers on roulette in a row – and it would have been 4 in a row had I been more organised on the first spin. $50 became $130. Woohoo. So I ticked that box too.

And that was the end of 3 nights in Vegas.

So what did I think of Las Vegas?

We were out of our hotel rooms by around 8/9am the next morning and boy were people getting on it. We then realised why hotel rooms were 4x the price of the night before – it was St Patrick’s Day. And it looked like they celebrated it in Vegas!

So we were kind of glad to be leaving – and be on our way to San Diego.

I could have gone to Las Vegas with my occasionally snobby attitude and be “fuck this place, fuck these people”, or I could have gone with an open attitude and had a load of fun. I chose the latter.

Sure, Las Vegas isn’t “James”. They play shite music EVERYWHERE, you can barely escape the trashy early 2000’s r’n’b or Katy Perry or Rihanna – yadda yadda yawn. Some people are quite trashy and why is every fourth restaurant a Gordon Ramsay? There’s definitely an undercurrent of desperation in the eyes of some people there. And quite a homeless problem with plenty of people looking like they were on meth – we even saw someone attacking someone else with some kind of metal instrument one morning, just two metres in front of us.

Plus all the pretentiousness of some of the hotels, all the millions of Gucci shops and all that look at me nonsense.

Yet we had a hell of a lot of fun, two amazing meals, some great beer – and being in the sunshine was just wonderful, especially with it being in March and not too hot – around 25’C (though it was 13’C the week before…so we could have been unlucky).

Sure, Las Vegas isn’t quite my vibe. But I couldn’t help but have a super fun time over there.

And you know what? I’d go back. There are enough really good restaurants there that I’d like to try out, I’d like to try staying at one of the nicer hotels, spend more time in the Arts District and the old town, maybe actually spend more than 20 minutes on a casino table. Go see a burlesque show (which we needed did until my sister saw the word “topless”) and spend more time fawning over showgirls. Maybe stay on a weekend to see how crazy it gets.

And oh my, I nearly forgot. Showgirls. I actually fell in love with most of them, but especially these two Latino showgirls outside a hotel, in bright red corset style tops and those legs…oh my.

I’m too tight and not quite pervy enough to have a photo taken with them…but this photo stolen from the internet is pretty much what I remember of Las Vegas.

How can you not have a great time in this place?

And then it was onto San Diego. Of which I will talk about more in due course.