Our vacation in Las Vegas (Nevada)
Wednesday, 17th May 2006
It's 8am and I'm awake - Karen's still trying to sleep, she's got a sore tummy (from last night's supper?).
We started off the day by visiting the Luxor and its Egyptian structures - the pyramid, the sphinx - I started thinking how much of these structures and Roman structures were built through the sweat of slaves, all this beauty through so much pain. Well, the original structures were put together by slaves - at least the Vegas structures weren't the result of slave labour! (although the unions may disagree!).
Mandalay Bay is a fairly boring casino, however it did inspire my brain for a Vegas advertising idea - set up a giant interactive billboard onto a casino. Set up a giant handle for people to pull outside the casino. Allow people to line up and play this slot game - but hey, maybe it would turn people away from playing slots at casinos because we all know that most of the time people gambling lose money.
Bus Queues
To travel along the strip and beyond we bought 24-hour bus tickets, each costing $5. This allows you unlimited usage of the busses...however, be warned, the bus queues can sometimes be loooong. It's quite a pleasure getting on the busses, as they are air-conditioned to be between 70 and 80 Farenheit, whereas the outside temperature was over 100!
Bus queue on the Las Vegas strip
$1 Blackjack
I disovered a spot next to Circus-Circus, called Slots A Fun, which has a $1 blackjack table; and couldn't resist putting my rusty blackjack skills to the test. With gusto, I put into practise my card-counting technique. I use the "unbalanced 10's" method of card-counting, which basically tells me when there are disproportionately too many 10's in the pack. This allows me to calculate exactly when it's advantageous to take out insurance against the dealer getting blackjack. But, it also tells me when it's advantageous to press my bets - when there are lots of 10's normal blackjack techniques like when to double work much better...I started gambling at about 6pm and ended at 2am, about $40 down but I had a lot of fun and 8 hours of free drinks (now if I still drank alcohol I could have really milked the casino!) The one buck table is great fun. The dealers did make at least 3 mistakes which I picked up (2 in the house's favour and 1 in my favour...one dealer commenting that counting isn't her strong point!).
Las Vegas's Casino
These photos weren't all taken on the same day, but I decided to keep the photos of each hotel together.