A quick 2.5 hour drive later, we arrived at the very popular Las Vegas Boulevard aka “The Strip”. The obvious goal of the Party-/gambling-/entertainment-/luxury-mile is to fulfil even the weirdest wishes of its customers. Whatever that might be… Everything is possible here. You name it, you’ll find it. Luxury Hotels (which are apparently not as expensive as one might think, e.g. the Bellagio is only 80$/night/room during the week) in the weirdest shapes, luxury shopping, night clubs, day clubs, pool parties, 24h-nightclubs, shows, circus and of course gambling everywhere. We could extend this list arbitrary…
After we found a parking lot (which are free in all the hotels on the strip), we were almost knocked out by a wall of heat. Las Vegas is actually really hot. In order to name it, it was every day more than 40°C, once even 45°C. Anyway, we just wandered a bit around through the acclimatized Casinos and Hotels which try to top each other with extraordinary themes. To name a few, there is a copy of the old Rome (Caesars Palace), Paris, Venice (incl. the famous canal in the second floor of the building where you can take a ride on a gondola), Monte Carlo, New York, a castle called Excalibur, a pyramid with a copy of Ramses, etc. Additionally, each of them has a special attraction. The Bellagio has a show with water fountains and music every 10-15 minutes, Caesars Palace shows the sinking of Atlantis (whoever was so bright to connect Rome and Atlantis) and in Treasure Island a volcano erupts every hour after sunset.
After checking out the area a bit, we caught up with Mike and Michelle in their hotel. You possibly remember them, as they were our two Couchsurfers from Perth, who borrowed us their tent for our trip on the West Coast. Saturday was Michelle’s birthday and of course that had to be celebrated in Vegas! After a bit of chatting, we went to another room, where two friends of them from Perth were staying (we already got to know them in Perth) and we drunk some cocktails together and figured out a plan for the next days. The others wanted to go to a concert in a night club the same evening, but we found the tickets a bit too expensive and would have needed new clothes for it anyway, why we gave it a miss (we obviously didn’t have proper dresses for a night in Vegas in our luggage…) However, we wanted to join them at her actual birthday to a pool party and tried to get tickets for it, but first we met our couchsurfing hosts in Vegas!
Heiko (31) and Susan (28) are a German-American married couple, who moved to America not too long ago in order to work here. As Susan already lived and studied in Germany for five years, her German was quite fluent why we mostly talked in German (which was sometimes really weird as we talked so much English previously…). It was, typical for our experiences in America, a perfect time as they were super nice and easy-going. We also tried to get the tickets for the pool party, but unfortunately the ticket skyrocketed why we had to give the party a miss.
However, while searching for deals Tobi found out how the system Vegas works. It’s actually pretty stupid to pay admittance for nightclubs or other parties here, as there are hundreds of promoters who are pretty happy to put one on the guest list for free. We wrote one of them, who invited us to 5 different parties within the next two days (sometimes incl. drinks). But unfortunately the pool party on Saturday was completely overcrowded which was really a bummer.
The next day (the day before the birthday), we bought a present for Michelle and drove back to the strip in order to explore it a bit more. In the evening we caught up with Mike and Michelle again and drove together to the “Old Strip”, because Heiko and Susan wanted to show us around there. A totally different experience compared to the actual strip, but much more fun in our opinion. There are enormous Hot Dogs and Burgers and fried sweets for a very cheap price! We tried some Twinkies: fried, sweet dough, filled with crème and topped with chocolate and icing powder. Very sweet, delicious …. and unhealthy! Next to all the food, there is free live music and at a certain time the roofing transforms into a huge screen and shows a concert of a specific artist. When we were there it was Bon Jovi.
The next day (Michelle’s birthday) it continued like that, but this time we stayed on the strip in the evening and watched Las Vegas by night. To make it short, even more crazy than during daytime, as the strip hosts a lot of street artists in addition to the crowds. Beside the shows we already mentioned at the beginning, we also watched a free circus show in the casino “Circus Circus”. After we saw the show at Bellagio for the third time, we drove back home and were done with the Strip.
We spent our last day in Vegas with visiting the Hoover Dam together with Mike and Michelle plus another friend of them from Perth (who also travels at the moment and flew in for her birthday as well). The Hoover Dam is quite famous, as it is the widest dam in North America, which also dams the Colorado River. There are two ways to visit it. First we went over the fairly new bridge (before it was built, all the traffic actually went over the dam itself), which offers a quite spectacular view on the dam from ab ove before we drove over the actual dam. Basically, really huge and quite windy to stay over the Grand Canyon. Afterwards we visited the Red Rocks and drove a loop through (again) diverse stone formations. Summary: Really beautiful, but compared to the other canyons we saw before quite average. We drove the three Aussies back to their hotels and back to Heiko and Susan who invited us for a barbecue at their pool. Of course you don’t say no to that!!! It was actually our first American barbecue, with corn (of course 🙂 ), chicken in Terriyaki sauce and potatoes in melted cheese plus fruit salad. Super yummy! Of course we jumped in the pool to cool down from the heat and after it cooled down a bit (that is to say below 40°C) we jumped in the heated Jacuzzi, because we didn’t want to get a cold 😛
It was again time to say good bye the next morning and we went further to Utah. Utah? You might think we’ve been there before, don’t you? But that’s another story.