18 June 2009

Unscrambling six month old memories is often difficult, but our first ever trip to Vegas was more memorable than most of our holidays.

The first day of our trip started off inauspiciously. I was in the doghouse for working late the previous day – the Baglady had wanted to go down to Gatwick, do the early check-in at Virgin Atlantic and pay for an upgrade to comfy seats with extra legroom, but by the time I had finished packing it was really too late.

So on the morning of the 18th, all the best seats had already gone.

Still, it was a fine sunny morning, no delays were expected and indeed there was a plane on the tarmac ready to take us to tinseltown:

Having travelled with smokers before I was already prepared for a reasonable amount of tetchiness, but aside from that the flight was as uneventful as anyone could wish. Once landed I was impressed with the efficiency of the US immigration people: fast, polite, efficient. And before you know it we were outside in the Vegas heat…

The heat of Vegas in June is pretty special. It slams into you immediately you go outside, you feel like someone has got a huge magnifying glass and focussed the sun onto you. So we didn’t spend much time hunting for a courtesy bus and were glad to get to the front of the taxi queue and back into air conditioning.

The Mirage was going to be our home for the fortnight. Baglady had made a good choice. It’s at the heart of the strip and our room was clean and very comfortable…

… overlooking the pool…

… with a view down the Strip ….

… and a view across to the Rio where the WSOP was in full swing…

Having dumped our luggage, first things first: find a bar. The Mirage was pretty busy but we found seats at the lobby bar.

The Mirage lobby is actually pretty spectacular, with one wall taken up by a huge and colorful tropical fish tank. To get to the casino and rooms you have to cross a bridge over the river that runs through the jungle atrium; the lobby bar is inside the atrium. Here’s a picture from my seat in the bar, pretty special eh:

A bite to eat and then off to bed. We have 2 weeks here, no need to burn out on Day 1!

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