LAS VEGASMONDAY 14TH SEPTEMBER 2015
Up early to catch the Greyhound to Las Vegas. A taxi takes us from just outside the hotel and we are down to the coach station by 07.30. We sit in the waiting room, surrounded by our bags, waiting to be called, which, after about forty minutes, we are, and we queue through gate 5, the driver checks our tickets, and tells us to put our bags: "Over there, man," pointing to the the side of the coach where another chap is loading them in to the baggage locker.
We are both studying our fellow passengers. A mixture of people. Black, white, young, old, just like any other terminus of any other type of transport - train, plane, ship or what ever… but somehow we know that they are not quite like any other group of passengers on other forms of transport. This is the cheapest way to get about in America (as it is in the U.K.) and so our fellow passengers are students with back packs, old age pensioners with flimsy suitcases, ladies of a certain age fleeing from their boring husbands, elderly men, like C and me, looking for adventurous travel.
C lets me sit by the window, lifts our on-board bags in to the airline type locker above our head. The seats are just a little bigger than British Airways Travellers World, but not much. We leave at 08.30, right on time, cross the Bay Bridge, head for Bakersfield. The ride is smooth, the driver speaks on the P.A. system listing various rules governing our ride: No smoking, devices to be played only with headphones, mobile phone calls to be kept to a minimum - stuff like that. All of them seem sensible to me.
We reach Bakersfield and change coach's. This second coach is a little more comfortable as it is not so full. We are able to have two seats each. A couple of students sprawl their legs across the aisle like students do; a black woman talks loudly to her friend, a Chinese girl taps the keys of her i-phone and looks puzzled. I work on my laptop, We stop at a fast food restaurant/souvenir/ gift shop. "Twenty minutes here, folks," the driver tells us. "You can bring your drinks and food on board if you want to."
We troop off. The afternoon air is warm and humid. C and I buy hot chocolate and snacks each.
We all re-board. Some carrying cardboard cups of hot coffee, the American version of a sandwich that is virtually a meal, others have donuts or hamburgers, hot-dogs, milk-shakes. The driver hangs rubbish bags at strategic points on the coach and tells us: “Put your trash in these trash bags, folks.”
The hours have ticked by and the sun is dipping down. We are travelling through a desert, mountains in the distance. I doze for a while. When I wake the road has widened and there is traffic all around us, it is dark and the time is quarter to nine in the evening. The coach pulls in to the Greyhound bus station near Freemont Street, Las Vegas.
We wheel our bags through the exit in to the street; it is warm and humid. I manage to hail a taxi almost immediately and in fifteen minutes we are checking in at the ‘Treasure Island” hotel and casino.
The coach journey from San Francisco took 12 hours but, surprisingly, the time went by quickly, perhaps because of the constantly changing scenery together with the novelty of it all.
TUESDAY 15TH SEPTEMBER 2015
C and I were in Las Vegas in 2009 for my niece Toni’s wedding. She was married in the gardens of “The Flamingo,” a few hundred yards from the “Treasure Island.” The city seems busier than ever. There are many new buildings, new road networks and pedestrian bridges, there seems to be more neon, more flashing advertisements, even more people crowd the pavements.
By 09.30. we are up and about and cross Las Vegas Boulevard (known as ‘The Strip”) and have breakfast at a restaurant opposite the hotel. We sit outside, by the water feature, where ducks are swimming up and down, anticipating tit-bits from the tables, as are a group of almost tame sparrows that hop about the floor and even venture on to the table as we eat.
After breakfast C decides to go for a walk while I go back to the room, anxious to get on with this journal and email Heather. At last we have wi-fi and I’m connected to the internet so I can try and catch up.
"Treasure Island" is a big hotel, hundreds of rooms, like all the hotels on The Strip, though some are ever larger than this one. We are on the 20th floor. The room is comfortable, at the back, opposite us is an equally tall building with "Trumps" in large neon letters on the side. I send off e-mails, one to Heather of course. C comes back after a couple of hours. "It's been raining." He tells me. I hand't noticed, Look out of the window and it does look a bit cloudy.
We bought a Berlitz Handbook: USA to accompany us on our travels and it tells me ‘Las Vegas is one of those myth laden towns that everybody should visit at least once.’ Too true. Over the last forty-odd years I have visited at least four times and each time it seems to get wilder and more extravagant. I am not a gambler, and nor is Cyril, and gambling is what the place is all about, so I have to stop and think what it is that attracts. It’s not too difficult. The town is fascinating. The lights are brighter, the neon advertisements more elaborate, the atmosphere more stimulating than anywhere else I have been to. If you want costly, big star, show biz stage entertainment this is the place, “Entertainment Capital Of The World’ it claims. Perhaps. We looked in to going to one of them, at “The Mirage” (The Mirage and Treasure Island has a little train/tram system running between them.) The show was a Beatles themed aerial artists extravaganza, but we decide our budget wouldn’t run to the somewhere around $200 per ticket cost.
Anyway, there is much free entertainment here: The dancing fountains at The Bellagio, the volcano at The Mirage, and other free shows outside some of the hotels. But the best free show is provided by the people. The thousands of visitors from all over the world; here they are, all around you. They sit at the one armed bandits with intense looks, concentrating earnestly, for any second now the jackpot of thousands will pay out. Or not. At one of the roulette tables a sudden scream of “Oh yeah! Oh mama!” Accompanied by cheers and claps as a punter wins and the croupier smiles indulgently and pushes stacks of coloured chips across the table toward him. Knowing, I suspect, those same chips will be returning to his pile shortly. Young girls, in short skirts, hand out alcoholic drinks, free if you are playing at the tables or the one-armed bandits. Other, attractive young girls, sit at the ‘Blackjack’ tables turning the cards, sweeping up the chips as ‘the house’ inevitably, wins. Thousands – no, not thousands – millions of Dollars change hands every day of every year of every decade; and, I am sure, Las Vegas and a few hard headed business men and maybe women too, the owners of it all, become richer and richer.
So, here in Vegas, the rich do get richer, and to complete the cliché: the poor get poorer. And this seems to be proved by the amount of beggars sitting on the warm pavements. Young men in their twenties and young girls too, with cards around their necks stating: ‘I am homeless,’ ‘I am hungry,’ and similar appeals. They shake tins at you, “Have you got any spare change, man?” There are more here than there are in New York or San Francisco. The pickings are richer here; the punters wealthier.
Up early to catch the Greyhound to Las Vegas. A taxi takes us from just outside the hotel and we are down to the coach station by 07.30. We sit in the waiting room, surrounded by our bags, waiting to be called, which, after about forty minutes, we are, and we queue through gate 5, the driver checks our tickets, and tells us to put our bags: "Over there, man," pointing to the the side of the coach where another chap is loading them in to the baggage locker.
We are both studying our fellow passengers. A mixture of people. Black, white, young, old, just like any other terminus of any other type of transport - train, plane, ship or what ever… but somehow we know that they are not quite like any other group of passengers on other forms of transport. This is the cheapest way to get about in America (as it is in the U.K.) and so our fellow passengers are students with back packs, old age pensioners with flimsy suitcases, ladies of a certain age fleeing from their boring husbands, elderly men, like C and me, looking for adventurous travel.
C lets me sit by the window, lifts our on-board bags in to the airline type locker above our head. The seats are just a little bigger than British Airways Travellers World, but not much. We leave at 08.30, right on time, cross the Bay Bridge, head for Bakersfield. The ride is smooth, the driver speaks on the P.A. system listing various rules governing our ride: No smoking, devices to be played only with headphones, mobile phone calls to be kept to a minimum - stuff like that. All of them seem sensible to me.
We reach Bakersfield and change coach's. This second coach is a little more comfortable as it is not so full. We are able to have two seats each. A couple of students sprawl their legs across the aisle like students do; a black woman talks loudly to her friend, a Chinese girl taps the keys of her i-phone and looks puzzled. I work on my laptop, We stop at a fast food restaurant/souvenir/ gift shop. "Twenty minutes here, folks," the driver tells us. "You can bring your drinks and food on board if you want to."
We troop off. The afternoon air is warm and humid. C and I buy hot chocolate and snacks each.
We all re-board. Some carrying cardboard cups of hot coffee, the American version of a sandwich that is virtually a meal, others have donuts or hamburgers, hot-dogs, milk-shakes. The driver hangs rubbish bags at strategic points on the coach and tells us: “Put your trash in these trash bags, folks.”
The hours have ticked by and the sun is dipping down. We are travelling through a desert, mountains in the distance. I doze for a while. When I wake the road has widened and there is traffic all around us, it is dark and the time is quarter to nine in the evening. The coach pulls in to the Greyhound bus station near Freemont Street, Las Vegas.
We wheel our bags through the exit in to the street; it is warm and humid. I manage to hail a taxi almost immediately and in fifteen minutes we are checking in at the ‘Treasure Island” hotel and casino.
The coach journey from San Francisco took 12 hours but, surprisingly, the time went by quickly, perhaps because of the constantly changing scenery together with the novelty of it all.
TUESDAY 15TH SEPTEMBER 2015
C and I were in Las Vegas in 2009 for my niece Toni’s wedding. She was married in the gardens of “The Flamingo,” a few hundred yards from the “Treasure Island.” The city seems busier than ever. There are many new buildings, new road networks and pedestrian bridges, there seems to be more neon, more flashing advertisements, even more people crowd the pavements.
By 09.30. we are up and about and cross Las Vegas Boulevard (known as ‘The Strip”) and have breakfast at a restaurant opposite the hotel. We sit outside, by the water feature, where ducks are swimming up and down, anticipating tit-bits from the tables, as are a group of almost tame sparrows that hop about the floor and even venture on to the table as we eat.
After breakfast C decides to go for a walk while I go back to the room, anxious to get on with this journal and email Heather. At last we have wi-fi and I’m connected to the internet so I can try and catch up.
"Treasure Island" is a big hotel, hundreds of rooms, like all the hotels on The Strip, though some are ever larger than this one. We are on the 20th floor. The room is comfortable, at the back, opposite us is an equally tall building with "Trumps" in large neon letters on the side. I send off e-mails, one to Heather of course. C comes back after a couple of hours. "It's been raining." He tells me. I hand't noticed, Look out of the window and it does look a bit cloudy.
We bought a Berlitz Handbook: USA to accompany us on our travels and it tells me ‘Las Vegas is one of those myth laden towns that everybody should visit at least once.’ Too true. Over the last forty-odd years I have visited at least four times and each time it seems to get wilder and more extravagant. I am not a gambler, and nor is Cyril, and gambling is what the place is all about, so I have to stop and think what it is that attracts. It’s not too difficult. The town is fascinating. The lights are brighter, the neon advertisements more elaborate, the atmosphere more stimulating than anywhere else I have been to. If you want costly, big star, show biz stage entertainment this is the place, “Entertainment Capital Of The World’ it claims. Perhaps. We looked in to going to one of them, at “The Mirage” (The Mirage and Treasure Island has a little train/tram system running between them.) The show was a Beatles themed aerial artists extravaganza, but we decide our budget wouldn’t run to the somewhere around $200 per ticket cost.
Anyway, there is much free entertainment here: The dancing fountains at The Bellagio, the volcano at The Mirage, and other free shows outside some of the hotels. But the best free show is provided by the people. The thousands of visitors from all over the world; here they are, all around you. They sit at the one armed bandits with intense looks, concentrating earnestly, for any second now the jackpot of thousands will pay out. Or not. At one of the roulette tables a sudden scream of “Oh yeah! Oh mama!” Accompanied by cheers and claps as a punter wins and the croupier smiles indulgently and pushes stacks of coloured chips across the table toward him. Knowing, I suspect, those same chips will be returning to his pile shortly. Young girls, in short skirts, hand out alcoholic drinks, free if you are playing at the tables or the one-armed bandits. Other, attractive young girls, sit at the ‘Blackjack’ tables turning the cards, sweeping up the chips as ‘the house’ inevitably, wins. Thousands – no, not thousands – millions of Dollars change hands every day of every year of every decade; and, I am sure, Las Vegas and a few hard headed business men and maybe women too, the owners of it all, become richer and richer.
So, here in Vegas, the rich do get richer, and to complete the cliché: the poor get poorer. And this seems to be proved by the amount of beggars sitting on the warm pavements. Young men in their twenties and young girls too, with cards around their necks stating: ‘I am homeless,’ ‘I am hungry,’ and similar appeals. They shake tins at you, “Have you got any spare change, man?” There are more here than there are in New York or San Francisco. The pickings are richer here; the punters wealthier.
WEDNESDAY 16TH SEPTEMBER 2015
It rained a little yesterday, nothing more than a shower really. Today the sun is back with blue skies and it is in the high eighties. We decide to walk and stroll through several of the casino’s; Caesars Palace, The Flamingo, The Mirage. We walk down to the Treasure Island’s pool. It is big, ‘loungers’ all around, placed closely together. We sit at one of tables and watch people in the pool. It is very hot. None of them swimming, just clinging to the edges, chatting, drinking from paper cups.
I get up and take a photo of C sitting in the sun. “I’ll take another,” I say, and as I do one of the scantily clad waitresses bends down by his side. She is very attractive and her stance reveals much more than C realises. “Have fun,” she tells us, “You’re in Las Vegas!”
It is good here, relaxing, A woman walks past, thirty? Short blond hair. She stops, looks at us. “You’re brothers!” She says.
“How did you know that?” I ask.
She shrugs her shoulders. “I just know.” She says.
“Sit down.” Says C. “Tell us about yourself.”
She laughs, sits down. “I’m a senior nurse,” she tells us. Her name is Mary, she comes from New Jersey and is visiting Vegas for a few days. She asks about England, and we talk about our trip through the United States. We chat for ten minutes or more. A pleasant lady.
It rained a little yesterday, nothing more than a shower really. Today the sun is back with blue skies and it is in the high eighties. We decide to walk and stroll through several of the casino’s; Caesars Palace, The Flamingo, The Mirage. We walk down to the Treasure Island’s pool. It is big, ‘loungers’ all around, placed closely together. We sit at one of tables and watch people in the pool. It is very hot. None of them swimming, just clinging to the edges, chatting, drinking from paper cups.
I get up and take a photo of C sitting in the sun. “I’ll take another,” I say, and as I do one of the scantily clad waitresses bends down by his side. She is very attractive and her stance reveals much more than C realises. “Have fun,” she tells us, “You’re in Las Vegas!”
It is good here, relaxing, A woman walks past, thirty? Short blond hair. She stops, looks at us. “You’re brothers!” She says.
“How did you know that?” I ask.
She shrugs her shoulders. “I just know.” She says.
“Sit down.” Says C. “Tell us about yourself.”
She laughs, sits down. “I’m a senior nurse,” she tells us. Her name is Mary, she comes from New Jersey and is visiting Vegas for a few days. She asks about England, and we talk about our trip through the United States. We chat for ten minutes or more. A pleasant lady.
THURSDAY 17TH SEPTEMBER 2015
Most of the day we spend at the pool; I decide to go for a swim. A mistake. The water is cold, take-your-breath-away cold. Now I know why nobody swims but just paddle and hang on to the side chatting. I don't stay in for long. I go back to my book and the beating-down-from-a-blue-sky-sun. We laze around for several hours getting burnt. In the late afternoon we go back to the room and have a snooze and take a ride on the little train that takes us to The Mirage, and then decide to walk away from the Strip and find somewhere quieter - and perhaps less expensive.
We walk past the Big Wheel erected since I was here last. As tall as the 'London Eye' and all lit up (of course!) Music floats out to us as we pass bars and restaurants. Men at the doors trying to entice the punters. "Come in! Come in! The best food, the best show!
We see a likely bar, the neon sign proclaims: Slots! Blackjack! Roulette! Free drinks! We are half a mile, maybe less from The Strip. It is called 'Ellis Island.' We go in. The place is packed but I find a table and C goes to one of the bars. The menu's prices are are way below those on The Strip. C comes back with two beers. "A dollar each!" He says, triumphantly. We eat and discuss tomorrow when we are picking up the car - if all goes well, and the first thing we have to do is find a launderette.
FRIDAY 18TH SEPTEMBER 2015
Cyril's planning over the months has paid off. Everything we booked in advance has worked out well, the train, the hotels, the Greyhound coach, and today, the car. The girl at the desk finds our booking straight away. We accept an upgrade (for a price, of course) from a ‘compact’ to a ‘medium’ size. We will be spending a lot of time in it and driving thousands of miles, so why not?
We are old. We can’t take it with us.
The girl offers a Chevrolet ‘Impala.’ We take it. It turns out to be a good choice. It is roomy, quiet, comfortable, all the gadgets we need and some we don’t. We don’t need the lady sat-nav for instance. She does get us to a launderette we have found on the internet, but it takes a while. She goes wrong twice. And then, when we give her an address of the PNC Bank we want to visit, she takes us round in circles. She keeps saying: “Re-row-ting, re-row-ting.” (As in pow-ting.) But she is clearly an add-on because her screen proclaims she is: “Hertz.” So we decide to forgive her lack of geographic knowledge and ignore her for most of the trip.
We find the launderette and spend an hour or more doing our washing with the assistance of a very helpful man who looks as if he is from the orient.
Our last night in 'sin city.' Steve Campbell, our good American friend, whom we are hoping to meet up with when we get back to Stuart, Florida, has told us on Facebook, "Behave yourself in Vegas - as the saying goes: "Whatever goes in Vegas, stays in Vegas."
