Middlerun Does America: Days 24-25

Sunday

I woke up rested and ready to explore New Orleans. The hostel I stayed at is really close to the Canal St. streetcar line that goes to the French Quarter which made things pretty easy. I got on a streetcar and went down to Decatur Street. The girl behind the desk at the hostel had given me a map and suggested some places to check out so I looked around in shops and peeked into interesting-looking bars and restaurants. I checked out stalls at Jackson Square and another place that had some markets on.

I stopped for lunch at a cafe with live music, and ordered a beer and a muffuletta, which was pretty good, but a little too salty. After that I checked out Bourbon Street, which true to its reputation was seedy but seemed like fun. There were plenty of people there drinking and having a good time even on a Sunday afternoon.

That night I hung out with some people at the hostel and drank from the 12-pack of Budweiser I'd bought. Eventually we all got a couple of taxis and went out to Frenchman Street, which is Bourbon Street's quieter, gentler counterpart. We went to a couple of bars there with good music. I met a girl there who had lived in Armidale, where I used to live.

Then we got another taxi to Bourbon Street and went to a few more bars. The night gets a bit hazy from here. I ended up getting separated from my group and had to get back to the hostel on my own. I thought the streetcars ran all night so I waited for about half an hour, on my own at about 1 am, the whole time feeling like I was about to get mugged. Eventually I realised they weren't running and got a taxi.

Monday

On Monday I did a swamp tour. This was pretty cool. The company that runs the tours sent a bus to the hostel to pick up me and a couple of other people from the hostel. The bus then picked other people up from several million hotels around the French Quarter. "I didn't realise this was also a tour of the city," I joked to the other hostel people. Eventually we set off for the swamp, while the driver talked about the damage done to the city by Hurricane Katrina.

We arrived at a wooden building in the middle of nowhere, where the swamp tours departed from. I got a rubber wristband which served as a ticket, and the tour guide led my group to one of several boats tied up at a jetty. For the next hour and a half the guide took us around the swamp talking about its ecosystem, pointing out various animals including a bunch of alligators, and making lots of jokes, mostly about yankees. He'd brought a bag of marshmallows to throw to the alligators. It turns out alligators are big into marshmallows, so they got nice and close to the boat.

One of the interesting things the guide told us was about the effects of Katrina on the swamp. When the storm (as people there call it) hit, huge amounts of water entered the swamp. The river ended up overflowing, spilling over the river banks into a different area which created a new part of the swamp. This new area ended up being a great place for wildlife to thrive. It also happened to contain a house which was washed away by the flooding.

We visited another part of the swamp, where the water was covered in some kind of duckweed. As the guide explained, this was introduced to the area, which you'd think would be a bad thing, but it turned out to be a benefit to the ecosystem by protecting underwater organisms from the sun.

At the end of the tour the guide showed us a baby alligator which he was looking after. We all got to have a turn holding it.

After the swamp tour I got off the bus in the French Quarter to look around a bit more. After seeing some more shops and sights, I had lunch at a nice looking bar. They had an item on the menu called "Taste of New Orleans", with samples of traditional N'awlins dishes like gumbo, jumbalaya, and red beans and rice. This was nice, though overpriced and not very substantial.

Craving some music, I went to a bar on Bourbon Street. The music was cool but it was a bit of a ghost town - there were literally more people on stage than in the audience. I ordered a Budweiser, which seemed expensive at $5.50, until they started pouring three of them. I said I only wanted one but they told me it was three-for-one. Well, I thought, no sense in wasting all these beers.

The day slid into evening as I soaked up the music and drinks. I decanted my last beer into a plastic "go-cup" (a particularly cool part of New Orleans culture, where people are allowed to take alcohol out onto the street, and often do), and went to find a more lively bar. The night was still young and I'd just slammed three beers, so I reluctantly switched to light beer for the next couple of drinks while I listened to a sort of indie jazz group.

After that I went into a place that seemed cool and had a pretty good jazz band playing. It wasn't until I got a beer and looked around a bit more that I realised I'd been there just the night before with the people from the hostel. The previous night they were playing shitty dance music and it was full of douchebags, and now there was a jazz band and it was full of chilled out cool people. I barely recognised it. At one point a girl came over to me trying to sell me jell-o shots, which I'd seen people doing the night before. I told here I wasn't interested, which didn't seem to compute in her tiny brain. I literally had to use physical force to stop her from shoving two little plastic test tubes of jell-o shots into my mouth.

After a couple more bars with more cool music I ended up at a duelling piano bar, a bit like the one in Austin. I hung out there for a bit, but it was getting a bit late and I had to be up early in the morning to get the train to Memphis, so I got the streetcar back to the hostel and hit the hay.

Middlerun Does America: Day 23

Note: As I write this, it's been more than a month since I got back from my trip, so I've probably forgotten a few details.

The entirety of Saturday was taken up by the bus trip from Austin to New Orleans. The first bus left Austin at quarter to eight in the morning, arriving in Houston three hours later. When we got there I assumed my checked bag would be automatically transferred to the next bus, so I just got off and hung around in the terminal a bit, waiting for the New Orleans bus. Then I noticed something on my ticket that said I needed to transfer the bag myself. So I spent fifteen minutes trying to figure out what had happened to the bag, finally being told that in fact it would be transferred for me. I got on the bus, not entirely confident that my bag was on board.

Unlike my first couple of Greyhound trips, this one was crowded and noisy and generally awful. The ten hour trip from Houston to New Orleans were about as bad as the plane trip from Sydney to San Francisco. For most of the trip there was a huge fat guy sitting next to me with his legs intruding on my legroom, who watched a football game on his phone without headphones so everyone on the bus could hear it. I can't even imagine how someone can be so inconsiderate as to subject a busload of people to that. To make matters worse, the air conditioning was on full blast most of the way, the temperature hovering somewhere around absolute zero. When the driver finally turned it off everyone on the bus breathed a sigh of relief.

The final indignity of the bus ride was stopping at the Greyhound terminal in Baton Rouge for dinner. I was pretty hungry at that point and happy for the chance to eat, until I set my eyes on the retch-inducing offerings of the "restaurant" at the terminal. Reluctantly I bought something claiming to be a ham and cheese sandwich, though the meanings of these words has obviously changed somewhat in the hundreds of years that this "food" had been sitting in its plastic wrapper at room temperature.

The bus rolled into New Orleans at about 9 pm, driving past boarded up houses and large communities of homeless people living under elevated highways. I got off the bus and waited for my bag to be unloaded from the bus. As more and more bags were unloaded I got nervous, worried I would never see my bag again. Finally they went around to the other side, opened the other doors to the cargo hold, and there it was.

I grabbed my bag, left the terminal and got a taxi. We went to the hostel, called India House. A bunch of the people I met in Austin had stayed at India House and said it was pretty cool, and they weren't wrong. But by the time I checked in I was exhausted and not at all in the mood for socialising. At 10 pm on a Saturday night in New Orleans, I went straight to bed.

Middlerun Does America: Days 18-22

I've gotten a bit behind on blogging so I can't remember everything else that happened in Austin. Here are the highlights:

Went out on 6th Street a lot. 6th Street has tons of good live music and is generally pretty awesome, though it gets pretty frat-boyish at certain times of the week.

Visited the Texas Capitol building. Its main claim to fame is being taller than the US Capitol. It's pretty cool because you can walk right into the House of Representatives and the Senate, though the Senate closed before I got there because it was late in the day. There's a number of monuments on the grounds, including a replica of the Statue of Liberty and a Civil War monument with a plaque talking about how the North are a bunch of jerks.


Found a place called Pete's Duelling Piano Bar, which is probably the greatest bar in the world. It was just like that Daffy Duck/Donald Duck duelling piano scene from Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Two guys at grand pianos, each representing a different state, bantered with each other while playing. People would tip them, and whoever had the most tips at any given moment would sing funny stuff. It's incredibly fun to watch.

Went to the Alamo Drafthouse theatre. It's pretty cool because you can order food and drinks during the movie. I saw Drive, which is a pretty excellent movie.

Met heaps of cool people at the hostel. The hostel in Austin had the highest concentration of Australians I've seen at any hostel yet. I also met some awesome and funny Americans there. There was a duck who liked to hang around us when we were sitting outside, who the group decided was called Sam. Sam would drink beer spilled on the ground or left in a bowl.

Went to Barton Springs with some people from the hostel. Barton Springs is a cool place, there's a pool which is fed by a spring which keeps the water at 20-22 °C year round. I didn't get to swim there though, they kept closing the pool because of a thunderstorm off in the distance.

I found an Embassy Suites hotel which I assumed must be the one where Tucker Max allegedly, um, made a mess in the lobby. Though I later noticed there's more than one Embassy Suites in Austin.

Went to SoCo (South Congress Ave.), a trendy but quieter area of Austin. There's an area on Congress Avenue about a block long where food trailers congregate, offering all sorts of weird cuisine. I got some kind of spicy chicken thing served in a cone. I went to watch some band playing in an outdoor area, who did a pretty good cover of Baby Got Back. Then I went to the Continental Club, a live music venue of some note.

On my last night in Austin I went to watch the bats. The Congress Avenue Bridge is home to 1.5 million bats, where the inch-wide expansion joints inadvertently created the perfect home for them. Every night around sunset they all fly out to find food. Austin residents love them because they keep the mosquito population down, and lots of people gather by the bridge to watch them emerge. When I went, there was a few hundred people. Enough people that there was a guy selling cheap light-up toys for kids to play with.

Austin was a nice place to be. My only disappointment was that I didn't hear a lot of Texas accents. According to a guy I was talking to at the SoCo food trailers, you don't really get proper Texas accents in Austin because so many people come to Austin from elsewhere, and I can see why they would. The main downside, though, is that it's really hot. Close to 40 °C most days when I was there, and it gets even hotter in Summer. Overall I give Austin a rating of four out of five squirrels.

Middlerun Does America: Day 17

At 1 am on Sunday morning my flight left Las Vegas. The flight was OK, though the only in-flight movies available had to be bought for like six bucks. Stingy bastards.

I transferred in Houston. By the time we got to Houston it was about breakfast time, so I went looking for some food. I found a Wendy's which had a long line, and next to it there was a Mexican place with nobody waiting, so I decided to give them some business. This turned out to be a mistake - the breakfast burrito I got was the most disgusting thing I've ever eaten.

After a couple of hours of waiting and feeling like the burrito was going to come out the same way it went in, I got my connecting flight and arrived in Austin. Getting the bus into town I found some kind of festival happening. I suddenly found I had an intense craving for freshly squeezed lemonade, and within a couple of minutes I was able to locate a lemonade stand. Funny how that works.

I got another bus to the hostel. The hostel in Austin is in a great spot right on the shore of Lady Bird Lake, but for some reason everything around it is a bit iffy. Walking there from the bus stop took me past all sorts of old shut-down buildings.

After checking in and dumping by bags I went back into town to have a better look at the festival. There were all sorts of stalls selling the standard stuff stalls sell, a couple of bands playing, a petting zoo, pony rides and that sort of thing. There was also a Lego thing with big lego animals, a model town, and a few building competitions in progress. That was pretty cool. I saw a sign pointing to a climbing wall, which I assumed meant indoor rock climbing, but it turned out to be a giant flat sheet-metal wall with magnetic things to strap onto your feet and hands to climb the wall. Which would be really fun if it worked properly, but the kids doing it kept slipping because the magnets couldn't quite support them. Lame.

All this was happening on 6th Street, which is the main bar scene in Austin. Even during the day there's lots of bars open playing live music. I picked one more or less at random. The band playing there was awesome. The two guitarists both played like maniacs and the woman had an great singing voice. They played loud fast country rock and they even played Another Brick in the Wall Part 2. I really wish I could remember what they were called.

At one point two parents stood by the door with a kid, maybe two or three, holding a ukulele. The kid walked up to the stage like he wanted to join in. Someone helped him onto the stage and everyone cheered. The band started maing jokes about welcoming their newest member. The kid looked like he wasn't sure what to do but when he held the ukulele up like he was about to bust out a solo the crowd went fucking nuts, cheering louder than the band was playing. Somebody tipped him a dollar. It was hilarious.

After they finished their set I got a bus back to the hostel. Remember how I said it's in an iffy area? As I walked from the bus stop to the hostel some guy asked me for money because his "car ran out of gas", which I assumed meant he wanted beer and/or cigarettes. So what I did was, I offered to walk with him to a service station and buy some petrol. He said that wouldn't work because his car was parked elsewhere. I asked him how, if I gave him money, he would get the petrol to his car and he said he'd get a jug. Notice the logical contradiction there? Like he somehow can't use a jug if I'm the one buying the petrol. I said I didn't have any cash and he said if I bought him some cigarettes he could sell them to someone for petrol money. At this point I was pretty sick of it so I suddenly "remembered" that I still had a bit of cash on me, gave him a few bucks and got out of there. It's amazing how persistent people can be.

Middlerun Does America: Day 16

I got up after not quite enough sleep to give myself lots of quality Grand Canyon time. While eating breakfast I got talking to some of the other people at the hostel. There was a nice couple from Israel who were trying to get a ride out to the canyon so I offered to take them. After packing everything up we went out to the car and spent a few minutes trying to figure out how to open the boot to put their bags in. Eventually I gave up and consulted the manual.

The weird thing about the Prius is that there's no actual key, it's all wireless. After pressing the unlock button on the remote to no avail, I found in the manual that I had to press another unlock button in the car door. Finally we loaded in the bags and set off. The next challenge was to buy some petrol. At some (most?) petrol stations in America you have to pre-buy petrol to stop people doing a gas and dash. So that took some figuring out.

Finally we left Flagstaff and made the hour-and-a-half drive to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. By an amazing stroke of luck, entry to the Grand Canyon National Park was free that day (usually $25 for a car) because of National Public Lands Day, so that saved a bit of cash. We found a parking spot and I said goodbye to my passengers, who were planning to stay for the night in one of the hotels near the canyon. I hope they managed to find something.

The Grand Canyon really is a breathtaking sight. It's not something that can be fully conveyed by photos. Although, it's so staggeringly huge that your eyes can't really get any depth perception on most of it so it ends up looking a bit like a giant painting.

There was a few good lookout spots near the carpark and a trail which led along the rim of the canyon. I walked along the trail for a while getting some good photos, but trying to walk any appreciable distance along the Grand Canyon is like trying to drain the Pacific Ocean with a thimble so I ended up going back to the car to drive to some other viewing spots. Desert View Road runs through the trees near the rim, and goes by various viewing areas, each of which give a slightly different view of the canyon.

Yaki Point is on this road. Back in the day people used to take a 12-hour stagecoach ride from Flagstaff to Yaki Point to see the Grand Canyon and stay in the hotel there, which is gone now. It was near there that there used to be a silver mine. It's still possible to go into the canyon and walk right into the mines, although it's not safe. There are hiking tracks that go from Yaki Point down into the canyon, which would have been great to do but I wasn't really prepared for hiking and didn't have the time. I did go down one track just for a few minutes which gave a pretty great view, and by the time I got back up the steep trail I was already sweating and thirsty.

The last stop along the road before you leave the park is Desert View, which is home to a watchtower decorated with Native American paintings and doubling as a gift shop, and another store selling food, drinks and more souvenirs. The watchtower doesn't really give a much better view - the canyon's so big that going up by ten metres means approximately nothing.

By about four in the afternoon I'd seen what I wanted to, and figured I should get back to Vegas to return the car and catch my flight to Austin. I hit the road and kept going for four hours, which is unusual for me as I tend to stop every couple of hours for drinks and stuff. But I was in the zone. I set the air conditioning just right, found a good radio station, figured out how to use the cruise control and just sat on the speed limit the whole time. With the straight roads, the cruise control and the automatic transmission I barely had to do anything except overtake the occasional truck and turn on the windscreen wipers at one point when it started to rain a bit. Before I knew it I was driving through Boulder City, Nevada, and getting hungry. I pulled into Taco Bell and got some weird thing called a crunchwrap. That was pretty good. Then I pressed on to Vegas, filled the petrol tank and let the GPS guide me back to the rental agency.

After dropping off the car I caught the shuttle from the Rent-A-Car Center to the main part of the airport and checked in for my 1 am flight to Austin. I went through the TSA security theatre stuff, which was a bit of an ordeal as I'd been led to believe, but only took five minutes or so. When you go into that pornoscanner thing, you have to raise your hands above your head like you're being arrested. I'm not convinced that is entirely necessary. I also had to throw away some perfectly good shampoo and conditioner, but I was expecting that. After all, shampoo is a crucial ingredient in all sorts of explosive devices. After this was done and they were convinced that the empty water bottle in my bag was not, in fact, a threat to national security, I caught the tram that goes to the terminal.

Where the inner sanctum (as I like to call it) of the Sydney airport was a giant shopping centre, the inner sanctum of the Las Vegas airport is just another bloody casino. Row after row of poker machines stretch the length of the terminal. I shoved a dollar in one for old time's sake and after a few spins I hit one of the mystical combinations of cherries or whatever, and my credit went up to $2.14. I printed a ticket and took it to the cashier to claim my newly acquired fortune.

After an hour or so it was time to board. I was going to take my backpack as carry-on, but they were concerned about running out of overhead storage space so they offered to check bags for free, which usually costs $25. I hurried over to the desk and gave them my enormous bag. That's twice in one day I saved $25! Plus the couple I gave a ride to the Grand Canyon gave me $20 for petrol, so that's $70 made/saved in one day, just by sheer luck. No, wait. $71.14. Good old poker machines. Who says you can't get lucky in Vegas?

Middlerun Does America: Day 15

On Friday morning I went to the Rent-A-Car Center at the airport to pick up a car to drive to the Grand Canyon. The process of renting the car opened my eyes to a whole new world of mathematics, as I watched $33.49 per day turn into $280 for two days, as various fees, taxes and insurance were added up. The guy at the rental agency convinced me to get a Prius for an extra ten dollars a day on the pretense that I would save more than that much in fuel. It later occurred to met that this was bullshit, as Priuses only really save fuel during stop-start city driving and are about the same as any economy car on the highway.

I was worried about adapting to driving on the right-hand side of the road and sitting on the left-hand side of the car, but this turned out to be easy. The real difficulty was adapting to the Prius's weird controls. The GPS was also a bit unreliable, and failed to tell me when to turn off to visit the Hoover Dam.

The Hoover Dam is one of the highlights of the trip so far. Marking the border between Nevada and Arizona, you can drive right across the top of the dam wall, which is in fact what people had to do to cross the lake before they put in the new bridge last year. After parking the car and stepping out into the billion degree heat, I quickly realised that my choice of long pants was a foolish wardrobe decision and quickly changed into a pair shorts in the car, before drenching myself with sunscreen.

I walked back from the carpark to the dam, past the Arizona spillway, one of two spillways which protect the dam from damage by letting excess water spill safely to the river below. The Nevada spillway is on the other side.

Snapping a few photos of the dam wall, intake towers and electrical stuff, I made my way to the visitor centre to do the tour. There are two tours, an $11, half hour tour of the power plant, and a $30 hour-long tour which also takes you right into the tunnels in the dam wall. Needless to say, I did the full tour.

The Hoover Dam is really a thing of beauty, and deliberately so. One of the things they explained on the tour was that when the dam was being designed, they wanted it to be not only functional, but an example of human achievement to inspire future generations. To this end the dam is full of intricate terrazzo tiling, brass doors and fixtures, statues and so on. One copper door had been polished every day since the dam was built, to the point where the finish had worn through to the base metal in one spot. Maybe at that point it's time to re-evaluate the polishing policy?

The tour started with a trip down a giant lift which took us all the way from the top of the dam to one of the diversion tunnels, which were built to divert the river while the dam was being built. The tour guide gave a talk about the diversion tunnels and how they started building the dam. From there we rode the lift back up to one of the power plants. The tour guide explained about how the water is drawn from the intake towers and drives the turbines, creating electricity which is mostly used in LA. Then the tightwads who didn't spring for the full tour had to leave, and the elite few of us continued on into the tunnels of the dam wall.

After walking through some tunnels and the tour guide explaining some things, we got another lift up to the tunnels about halfway up the dam wall. Eventually we came to a ventilation tunnel which ended at a grate at the surface of the dam. It was possible to stick a hand out through this grate and take a photo of the dam from below. The results were pretty cool. We also saw some steep stairs which led up and down to different levels, which the tour guide referred to at the Stairway to Heaven and the Stairway to Hell. In some spots on the tunnel walls there were crayon marks with numbers. The tour guide explained that these markings indicated cracks that had been found. She pointed out one that was marked in 1948. It was so thin I couldn't even see it. That's how meticulous they are.

Finally we got another lift back up to the top of the dam. After the tour I went and saw the large model of the Colorado River that is there, including a model of the dam. By then I was starving so I went to get lunch. Pro tip: if you're visiting the Hoover Dam, bring your own lunch. I paid $9 plus tax for what amounted to a Big Mac. I guess they need to make as much money as they can since the new visitor centre apparently cost more than the dam itself (though I'm pretty sure that's not adjusted for inflation).

Then it was time to hit the road again and I set off down the I-93. The plan was to drive to Flagstaff, Arizona, spend the night there, and see the Grand Canyon in the morning. Over the next few hours the landscape gradually changed from barren desert to a much more green, tree covered affair, which was a nice change. I kept seeing signs along the highway indicating turnoffs to parts of the famous Route 66 but I didn't really feel like changing my course to drive on it, even for the bragging rights. Though it turned out that driving into Flagstaff takes you along Route 66, so I did get to drive on it after all.

The GPS unit dutifully led me to the hostel in Flagstaff, a nice wooden building across the road from some lively looking pubs. I checked in, dumped my bags and had a look around the hostel. It was pretty reasonable except for not having any basins in the bathrooms to wash your hands, just a bottle of alcohol-based hand sanitiser. Eww. After settling in a bit I got ready to go downtown for some dinner and a few beers. The main downtown area of Flagstaff was only a couple of blocks away which was a nice change from the epic bus treks in LA and Vegas.

I didn't know what to expect from Flagstaff but it's actually really cool. Flagstaff has cool looking bars full of college students like Las Vegas has casinos full of poker machines. I found a decent looking restaurant and ordered the most vegetable-filled thing I could find in a vain attempt to compensate for two weeks of burgers and pizza. After that I found an Irish bar, had a couple of beers and observed the American college students. The stereotypes are true. I felt like David Attenborough.

Before long I figured it was time to get some sleep since it was going to be a long day tomorrow. I finished my beer, went outside, chatted with a few people for a while then went back to the hostel and went to bed. Anyway, it turns out that on a Friday night when thousands of students all leave bars at the same time, things get kind of noisy. Who knew?

Middlerun Does America: Days 12-14

Tuesday
On my last day in Los Angeles I was pretty exhausted by the trip so far so I took a holiday from my holiday and didn't do much. I went to a nice Moroccan barber shop on Venice Boulevard and got a much needed haircut, then went back to the boardwalk for another look around. It wasn't nearly as busy this time.

I also went to see the Venice canals, an imitation of the other Venice canals which spans something like eight blocks. I walked along the canals for a while taking photos with my phone. A lot of the houses have little jetties with small boats tied to them. Some boats were better-kept than others.

That night I spent hours trying to organize my trip to the Grand Canyon, which would happen after I spent a couple of night in Las Vegas. After considering dozens of possible permutations of bus trips, car rentals, flights and accommodation, I finally settled on a plan to rent a car from Vegas, drive to Flagstaff and spend the night there, then drive to the Grand Canyon the next day, spend most of the day there and then drive back to Vegas that night to return the car and catch a flight at 1 am to Austin.

Wednesday
I checked out of the hostel early to give myself lots of time to get to the Greyhound station for my bus to Las Vegas. I got there in plenty of time, and eventually the bus boarded and we set off. The trip was as pleasant as the last one, and I got a good view of the scenery as it turned gradually more rocky and deserty.

On the way there we stopped for lunch at some random town in the middle of nowhere. The place we pulled into had a few fast food options and fake train cars you could sit in and pretend to be in a dining car while you had lunch. There were a bunch of gift shops with various Las Vegas and Route 66-related souvenirs, plus some pretty realistic Airsoft guns. When it was time to get back on the bus I forgot which one was mine, but found the right one after an anxious few minutes.

Eventually the bus arrived in Las Vegas. Immediately I was hit with a wave of hot air. Being in the middle of a desert, Vegas is incredibly hot, but it's a dry heat which makes it much more tolerable. Public transport in Vegas mainly just runs up and down the Strip (aka Las Vegas Boulevard, where the main casinos are), so I was forced to get a cab to my hotel, the Riviera. The first taste of an expensive city.

The Riviera is a pretty nice hotel, especially considering how cheap it was. The prices at Vegas hotels plummet during the week in a bid to get as many people gambling as possible. (Unfortunately for them, the tiny amount of gambling I did was at other, nicer casinos.) The room was nice and clean and somehow actually looked bigger than the one in the photo.

That night I set off down the Strip to explore. The Strip is an amazing place. The thing that struck me more than anything else was just how huge everything is there. Each casino is so gigantic, it can take ten minutes just to walk from one to the next. For this reason some of the casinos have trams which run between them along elevated tracks.

Another weird thing is that on most intersections on the Strip, the only way to cross the road is by using big footbridges. An intersection will often have four of these footbridges, each with up and down escalators and a lift on both sides. That's sixteen escalators and eight lifts, for one intersection. They do have rivers in Las Vegas, but instead of water they contain money.

By far the most annoying thing about Vegas is the multitude of people who hand out flyers for (presumably) prostitution agencies. They all where the same style of T-shirt: solid colour with simple printed text along the lines of "Girls straight to you in 40 minutes! [phone number]". As you walk past, these clowns will try to hand you a flyer. I don't think I ever saw anybody take one. At first I said "no thanks" to each one, but very soon that was reduced to shaking my head, and shortly after that I gave up and just walked straight past them.

There's lots of cool things to see on the Strip without even entering a casino. Every fifteen minutes in the evenings, there's a fountain show on the huge lake in front of the Bellagio. Fountain nozzles rise up out of the water, and tilt and spray water in sync with music that plays through speakers along the footpath. The nozzles are so powerful that when they shoot at full force they sound like fireworks.

Also on the Strip is a half-scale replica of the Eiffel Tower and a 2/3 scale Arc de Triomphe at the Paris Las Vegas casino, replica canals of Venice at the Venetian casino complete with rideable gondolas, replicas of all sorts of New York landmarks at the New York New York casino, the Excelsior casino which is a giant castle, the Luxor casino which is a giant pyramid, and all sorts of other cool stuff. And neon. So, so much neon.

I ended up at the Nine Fine Irishmen, an Irish pub at the New York New York, which had a real Irish band and a fun, unpretentious vibe. After hanging out there for a couple of hours and spending far too much money on Guinness, the night was getting on a bit so I thought I should set off to find another bar. I ended up at Caesar's Palace, drinking Sierra Nevada Pale Ale in the presence of big marble statues.

On my way back to the hotel, someone on a footbridge tried to sell me cocaine. That was pretty funny.

Thursday
The next morning I had breakfast at the hotel buffet, which was pretty decent. Then I got the bus down the Strip to do a bit more looking around. One highlight was the Flamingo casino, which has a wildlife area at the back with live flamingos, other birds, big koi fish, a tortoise and other animals wandering about.

Next on the agenda was to go back to the New York New York to ride the rollercoaster (visible here). That was loads of fun, with a fast loop and a corkscrew, and gave a great aerial view of the Strip. As the rollercoaster car slowly climbed the giant initial hill, someone ahead of me called out, "how do you feel, Las Vegas?". "Terrified!" I called back. That got a few laughs.

I checked out a few more casinos I hadn't seen the night before, rode a couple of inter-casino trams, then went to get a better look at the Venetian. The canals at the Venetian aren't just outside - the large indoor shopping area has a long canal stretching almost its entire length and does a reasonable job of looking like a real, outdoor part of Venice. There was a shop here selling packs of cards which were used in actual play in various casinos. I bought a pack used by the Bellagio for two dollars.

That afternoon I tried out the pool at the hotel, which was pretty nice. Another fun activity was playing with the insanely fast hotel lifts. They're so quick that you can jump into the air as the lift accelerates downwards and you kind of float in the air for a moment like you're on the moon.

Later I went to the New York New York and rode the rollercoaster again. It was even more fun at night. I had a few more beers and explored a few more casinos, and eventually it was getting late so I headed back to the hotel to get some sleep. While waiting for the bus I met Mike from Boston.

Mike was a slightly creepy old guy who started talking to me about how he had just lost six thousand dollars gambling. He then told me he had been given a free ticket by the casino for Cirque du Soleil at the Bellagio on Saturday that he couldn't use and offered to give it to me. I cautiously said sure, and he called the Bellagio to have the ticket transferred to me. I got the feeling this was leading up to some sort of scam, and when he asked me for money for a taxi I pretty much knew he was full of shit, so I told him I didn't have any cash, and couldn't afford to go to the ATM to get some. He took some convincing.

Of course, the next day I called the Bellagio to confirm the ticket and, of course, there was no ticket. In fact the guy I spoke to on the phone asked if the guy who offered me the ticket was from Boston, which he was. He knew who I was talking about. So I guess that sort of thing happens a lot.

The thing I find most obnoxious about this scam attempt is that Mike was convincing me to alter my travel plans in order to be in Vegas on Saturday night for the show. Since I was going to be visiting the Grand Canyon on Saturday, I would have had to leave there earlier than I wanted to to get back to Vegas in time for the show. I would have had to get over to the Bellagio, find out there was no ticket, and get back to the airport, wasting lots of time and money. And for all this bullshit I would have had to go through, how much did Mike try to scam me for? One cab fare. Like twenty dollars. What a fucking jerk. If you're going to try to screw up my travel plans, at last have some goddamn ambition. Look at Bernie Madoff - he may be a grade-A arsehole, but at least he has cojones.