My trip to Vegas was less like a vacation and more like a magical fairy land get away. I had never dreamed of such wonder, such splendor, such dazzling festival celebrating life. Veags was an inmitigated wonderland where everything looks free and there's a whole lot of it.
My tale begins at home in Tucson as Chris, Brian and I plop into the rental car at 11:00 pm, each of us just coming off a full shift at our respective jobs. Armed with cheap fast food and the just-out Beastie Boys album, we began our 8 to 10 hour journy.
Chris took the first shift with Me on second followed by Brian closing out the trip. We drove all night and reached Vegas at around 7 am and indulged in the fine breakfast offerings of Denny's. The food was nothing short of wonderful served with perhaps the best Coca-cola in the universe. Loomong above us was the monolithic Stratosphere, one of my two quests on the trip.
The other quest, which may be laughable to some, was to find some Street Fighter 3 competition. I had heard that Vegas had the best of the best. As it turned out, I went undefeated and actually sent a child away crying. I am getting ahead of myself.
We weren't able to check into the hotel until 3pm so we decided to first park at the hotel and find a paper with the 'Calendar' section in it that tells what is around and who is in town. This became a very important paper very quickly, for a variety of reasons.
After we acquired the paper and made a quick and loose itenerary, we struck out on foot (bad idea as it turned out) to walk the strip. We were staying at the Sahara which is at the ass end of the strip and is kind of far from the other casinos, all except the Stratosphere that is. The downside is that we don't have any casinos to walk in for awhile, which is difficult in the July heat. I felt that I was pretty tough when it comes to heat given I live in Arizona but as it turns out, the Vegas heat is a special breed that does its best to emulate a 30 ton hand which oppresses you all day long. The up side to the outdoor trek is the free porn scattered along the roadside in handy newspaper dispensers. I call this porn, but what it really is is solicitation material. You want a stripper or some manner of playmate? Their advertising is available to anyone with the balls to collect it. Of course we didn't want to seem uncouth or look like fucking perverts, so we tucked each new packet of porno the news paper. In just a matter of minutes the skimpy friday paper looked like the Sunday edition.
We made it to Circus Circus and I had to go to the bathroom. When I returned, Brain was working the slots and sipping on a comped 7&7. We had all the debauchery begun before 10:00 am. I loved this place. We fucked around the casinos before making the trek back to the Sahara and finding that we could, in fact, check in at 1:00pm. We did. We wandedered over to the elevators to make our way up to the 22nd floor. Upon our arrival at the elevator bank, we discovered that the elevators were out of service and were informed that we'd have to use the stairs. So we proceeded up the stairs carrying all of our luggage. I think I was falling behind and somewhere on the 13th floor landing when I heard Brain's shriek that would make Hannibal Lecter wet himself. What was he shouting you ask? That he was at the roof. On the 14th floor. Yes that is right folks, we were at the wrong tower and had needlessly walked up 14 flights of stairs when the elevators to our tower was working quite nicely, thank you. Brain tried the entire weekend to get comped free shit but to no avail.
I could go on and regal you with the other details of our trip but I will now summarize. We gambled, played video games, rode roller coasters, played Laser Tag, ate good food and some shitty food. None of us got laid, which is mostly my fault for not buying drinks two seconds sooner but oh well. We slept maybe 5 hours the whole weekend and spent the rest of the time doing as much fun shit as we could. The Hilton's Star Trek attraction with the talking urinals, the MGM Grand and its martini's that would take the paint off a cruise ship, getting horribly lost in Ceasar's Palace after having stayed up all night, riding the Stratosphere 'Big Shot Ride' and almost having a heart attack, seeing 'There's Something About Mary' and having Brain act like he's retarded the rest of the trip, getting our asses kicked at laser tag by little bastards half our age, the list goes on. The abject lack of sleep amplified our fun and our incoherence made everything we saw look brilliant. Now, more than two years later, we are returning to wreak havok in the form of my bachelor party and the anticipation is growing. The greatest city in our fine nation is calling my name like some kind of succuubus ready to bleed my wallet and fill me up with the happy bliss that only comes with doing something really stupid and irresponsible. Oh Vegas, I salute you.