April 30, 2009
Editor’s Note: There is a photoblog of this trip on Facebook. Drop the author a line if you can’t find it.
Save for the three-year run of aerophobia I caught from terrorists, the flight to Las Vegas is always great.
Or was.
We were in the fourth row from the back on the port side. The three rows behind us were a wedding party, which always makes for a fun flight. The two back rows, starboard side, was a gang of women going to celebrate someone’s fortieth birthday. Again, positive. In the two rows in front of the women were a bunch of guys in their forties going for a bachelor party. Most of them harmless. However, directly next to me was That Guy.
Imagine if you put Al Czervik’s clothes — complete with what Luna calls “a bowl of soup hat” — on Fred Flintstone, and then poured sixteen Bud Lights into him. He spent the entire trip either trying to get the women to join them on the “party barge” they had rented on Lake Mead — it was going to be “awesome”, per him, though it kept making me sing “Twenty Yoopers in a pontoon boat, driven by my buddy Mike” — or trying get me, who was trying to work, to put a movie on my laptop for him to watch.
He also tried to pick up some girl walking up and down the aisle with a toddler, and one of his friends shouted “Run!” and she looked around and said, “To where?” for which I liked her very much.
His obnoxiousness eventually reached such a peak that I put on my noise-cancelling headphones. Didn’t plug them into anything, just put them on. Comedy is hard enough to write when you don’t have somebody yabba-dabba-dooing in your ear.
We landed at McCarran at roughly the same time as Rosey and Ken, so we shared a cab to the Hilton, where we met up with Andrea and Notorious. Everybody had a little nap/pool/settling time while Luna returned 247 voicemails and I checked to make sure nothing of major import had happened and transmitted.
Assembled around five — to our stomachs this was seven — and walked over to see Encore and hit the Wynn buffet for dinner. Encore makes me think of Dom DeLuise’s Caesar: “Nice. Not thrilling…but nice.” It looks like Wynn crossed with Bellagio, but there’s no innovation. Been there done that, y’know? Some of the restaurants look promising, but generally I can find most restaurants without a drive-thru least a little promising.
The Wynn buffet’s dinner is certainly as good as you’d expect, though I think, after extensive study, that the real value in buffets is to go on the breakfast/lunch cusp. Dinners are often too reliant on prime rib. Given a choice between unlimited prime rib and unlimited champagne…maybe my vice-balance is shifting, but I’d rather be drunk in the morning than processing two pounds of rare beef at eight p.m. There is a reason anacondas sleep so much.
What was eaten at the Wynn is covered on the Facebook Photo Tour,and more thoroughly and beautifully than I could do in words.
A little digestive amble followed. We walked through the new Palazzo mall area at the Venetian. They have broken some new ground here, unlike Encore, and it’s pretty spectacular. I suspect they are upside-down to the tune of about five hundred million, but that is their problem, not mine.
We rode the peoplemover — someone taught me the term “slidewalk” for these, which I like a lot — out to St. Mark’s Square. This took us past Madame Tussaud’s, who always puts a wax figure outside on display. This advertising tactic led directly to this exchange:
Luna: I wonder who’s outside. Oh! It’s Pavarotti.
Notorious: It doesn’t look very much like Pavarotti.
Me: Madame Tussaud’s is not a taxidermist.
We wandered through the Forum shops, had a drink and a digestive cigar at Casa Fuente (* * * * *), and then walked to the Bellagio, to see the fountains en route to the monorail station at Bally’s.
After the fountains, on the way to the mono, we came across somethig even better than the Fountains. In the mall under Bally’s, there is a sushi restaurant. You know those game machines where you put in a quarter and position a drop-claw over a beanie baby or x-ray specs or a gold watch or whatever,and then you press a button and the claw drops and tries to grab the prize and deposit it in a bin? The sushi restaurant under Bally’s is home to The Greatest Prize-Claw Game Ever Anywhere. You put in a couple bucks, and position the claw as desired over the restaurant’s pick-your-own-lobster tank. Win the lobster and they prepare it free. This idea came from a mind so fabulously avaricious and twisted, I cannot help but melt with admiration even now.
A few drinks at the spaceport bar, and we wrapped the evening.
That Prize-Claw Game is an idea on par with “the wheel.”
I’ll have to tell my sister about this restaurant. As I remember, she’s uncannily good at those games.