Musings of a Mediocre Mother
Vegas Baby! I’ve been there, done that but didn’t get the T-shirt. Yes, as part of our summer holiday visiting family, we booked 2 nights in Las Vegas, without the kids. What a bizarre place! I’m sure that in the short time we were there I didn’t get the full Vegas experience. Well, put it this way, I didn’t wake up with a tiger, a baby, a tattoo or teeth missing. I suspect I’m too old or too tired to stay up late to see its truly crazy side, at least I hope so. Otherwise, it’s just an artificially lit, slightly tacky theme park, full of zombie-eyed slot machine players. For me personally, I enjoyed it but probably won’t rush to go back.
Flying in to Vegas is quite surreal. You pass over miles of desolate, empty desert to then see Lake Mead, the 16th largest man-made lake in the world, created by the building of the Hoover Dam. It is enormous and azure-blue from the air, looking for all the world like the sea, complete with beaches. When you spot Vegas itself, it’s like glittering gold in the desert sun. As you approach the airport, you start to make out the themed buildings; the New York skyline, Le Tour Eiffel, the Luxor Pyramid, even a fairy tale castle. The Vegas experience starts at the airport upon arrival, where there are rows and rows of slot machines, filled with people pumping in their last bit of cash before departure.
There is definitely a ‘wow factor’ to the place and the taxi journey from the airport had me craning my neck to take in all the sites. For me though, the highlight of the trip was 2 nights in a luxurious hotel, something surely every mother dreams about? And Las Vegas does do good hotel, when I think that we paid almost the same for 1 night in a pub B&B near Chichester as we did for 2 nights in a suite of a hotel, with 5 pools and twice as many restaurants and bars. Fabulous!
What I did find very disconcerting, however, is that most of the public areas of all the big hotels; the casinos, restaurants, bars, foyers, shopping malls etc, have no natural light; they are kept at the same artificial light 24 hours a day so no-one has any sense of day or night, and supplied with oxygen rich air to keep people going. We were staying in a Venetian themed hotel, complete with gondolas and a canal, much of which was inside, but painted to look like it was outside – weird.
The hotel’s outdoor areas were stunning, huge pools, cushioned loungers, pool bars and swimwear clad waiting staff – girls only funnily enough. On our second day there, I took a stroll around the pools, wearing sunglasses and a flowing beach cover-up, stomach pulled really working it, and within a couple of yards stubbed my little toe so badly that it turned black and I’m pretty sure I broke it. I carried on walking as if nothing had happened whilst swearing profusely in my head. Sorry, I let the side down by not having a more outrageous story about the little piggy who went to Vegas, but if I do decide to embellish the facts, you won’t blame me I’m sure.
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Whilst away in Denver I learnt something new about Tunbridge Wells bizarrely. We went to Buffalo Bill’s Museum and grave, only to find out that he brought his Wild West Show to Tunbridge Wells in 1903. Cool eh?
MM
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