Today I will be using a rather cute up and over tap.
It was Sophia’s fourteenth birthday today. She’d brought some small presents from her family with her and lots of cards so after we’d woken up and sung Happy Birthday to her we went out to explore Las Vegas in daylight.
I had another small breakfast in the Casino Royale on The Strip. The breakfast was called ‘The Royale Combo’ and consisted of two huge pancakes, two eggs, two bacon, toast and maple syrup. Now all I had to do was waddle around all day and try to burn it off.
The roads here, particularly the Vegas Strip, are so wide you can’t cross to the other side before the lights change. At least The Strip had a central reservation but even then it was difficult to reach the middle without getting run over. Most of the roads had no central islands so you’d wait for the lights to show red, start to cross the street and end up stranded halfway across looking like a startled rabbit and praying that the traffic wouldn’t run you down as you sprinted across the remaining half of the road. I’d taken to going into training just before I knew I was going to have to cross a road. A few knee jerks, press-ups and deep breathing exercises on the pavement worked wonders. The running blocks so thoughtfully positioned on the kerb by every crossing helped too.
The Casino/Hotel complexes all have their own theme in an effort to be original and as different from each other as possible. This was all window dressing because once you were inside they were all pretty much the same really. One such Casino was based around Paris and was called, wait for it……..Paris. I could imagine the owners, just moved to Las Vegas and determined to build a new bigger and better Casino than all the rest. You’ve got the theme Paris, now what do you do? Well maybe you’d build the whole of the interior around a mock-up of a Paris street with Parisian cafes, restaurants and shops and add some French looking scenery to give it that authentic feel. OK, what else? Well the Eiffel Tower’s got to be featured somehow hasn’t it?
Someone must have said, “I know, let’s build a life-size replica of the Eiffel Tower, it’ll reinforce the image and have the added bonus of being seen from miles around.” OK, now what? That seems a bit too ordinary by Las Vegas standards doesn’t it? “I know,” somebody must have said, “let’s build it inside.”
“But the building isn’t high enough.”
“Just poke it out of the top.”
And that’s just what they’ve done. The Eiffel Tower is inside the Casino with its huge four legs straddling the gambling area and the rest of it just disappears into the ceiling and out of the top of the building.
After a while though, once you’ve been inside one Casino you’ve seen them all and if you weren’t there to gamble all that’s left are the shops that never close. This didn’t put Emma and Sophia off though, they spent many a happy hour wandering in and out and just looking. We found all the shows in Las Vegas so ridiculously expensive that we gave them a miss.
You can’t walk down The Strip without being constantly bombarded by people handing out leaflets for one offer after another, tours, restaurants, casinos or shows. It’s one big hustle and the whole town is on the make.
As it got dark we made our way down to another casino, this time called ‘Treasure Island’. All along one side of this building, facing the street, was a massive mock-up of the high seas, so big that they were able to position two full-size sailing ships on the water. One was a pirate ship, the other was one of Her Majesty’s frigates. Every ninety minutes they presented a ten minute re-enactment of a sea battle between the pirates and the English ship HMS Britannica. During the show HMS Britannica slowly sailed up to the pirate ship and there followed a sea battle with special effects, exploding cannons, pirates falling off rigging into the sea etc. until the pirate ship fired a broadside and actually sank the English ship. This huge frigate slowly sank lower and lower until it was almost submerged under the water. All this spectacle was totally free to the passing public in the street and attracted huge crowds along The Strip while it was going on.
Before going back to the motel we saw a bus with the following plastered all over it:
“CAT – Citizen Area Transit”
This of course meant “local bus”.
Dear oh dear.
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