Las Vegas - Day Six

FAREWELL LAS VEGAS

And so it had arrived – our last morning in Las Vegas, although our flight to Miami wasn’t until around midnight so we still had a day to fill. We packed everything up and headed down and checked out. Not keen to carry our luggage around a baking hot city in the desert, we headed to luggage storage to drop everything but our daypacks.

We decided to head to Denny’s for our final American breakfast but, after finding out it was a 45-minute wait for a table we headed off down the Strip in search of somewhere slightly less busy. After dilly-dallying around as to where to go or what to do, we headed back to Denny’s where, miraculously, the wait wasn’t as long (if only shortened by the passing of time) and, after 10 minutes, we got a table.

We had a few more casinos to check out before we left the city behind. So we headed south down the Strip to the MGM Grand to complete our tour of Terry Benedict’s casinos. Still with some cash on the hip we thought it was about time we gambled most of the rest, seeing as that had mostly been what we’d brought it for. Deciding that the stakes at a lot of casinos seemed to be little high to get any sort of reasonable playing time, we headed for Excalibur and the medieval castle themed hotel and casino.

I’d been playing the virtual tables all week but I was determined to play at a proper casino table and we headed for roulette to make our fortune. But the rules are different on the table – on the virtual games the minimum total stake can be as little as $3 and that can be made up of bets outside the game board, that is, red/black, odd/even, and so on. On the table the minimum bet was $20 and that could only be split across the numbers, not around the edge. This, with my limited budget, had turned high stakes very quickly. I laid out my numbers and the wheel spun and the ball whizzed around and… nothing. But I wanted another go.

So I laid out some numbers again and, looking to my darling wife for inspiration, put my last chip on MY birthday. The wheel spun and the ball whizzed around and bounced and bounced and settled… on 16! My birthday! So I immediately collected my winnings and walked off to the cages to collect my $66 of winnings (having tipped the croupier a couple of chips).

I was absolutely buzzing with excitement, although it wasn’t a big win, nor had it solved the issue of spending the last of our cash. But hey-ho. I walked in with $40 and walked out with more. I beat Vegas! (Or just Excalibur, on this occasion.)

As the afternoon started to wear on we thought we should head back to NYNY and use our “free” voucher that we had practically had to beg for. Tom’s Watch Bar (a sports bar, not a bar that sells watches) seemed relatively quiet so we headed there and ordered a couple of beers and some loaded fries. Don’t get us wrong – it was all really good. But that’s all we had. Our $50 voucher covered two cans of Miller Lite and one bowl of loaded fries. Just. We ate, we drank, we tipped and left.

Next stop on our Casino tour was to head north back up the Strip to Planet Hollywood. Near PH is a shopping mall called the Miracle Mile. I don’t know if it’s an actual mile long but it had a good selection of mid-range shops and shops full of holiday tat, like t-shirts, magnets and shot glasses. Determined to buy the first two of these we headed in and out of them until I had a Las Vegas t-shirt, Rosie had a “I HEART LAS VEGAS” vest and we had our fridge magnet.

We’d passed the giant Paris balloon Eiffel Tower which stands out front of the hotel a few times this week, but had yet to go in. The hotel has a restaurant on the first floor of the Eiffel Tower – we didn’t get to eat there as it looked pretty expensive, even for Vegas – not surprising as it probably has one of the best views of the Bellagio fountains for anyone not with a lake view room at the Bellagio itself.

This was day 6 and to be honest, we were starting to get a little tired of seeing the same attractions over and over again. And it wasn’t like you could go to a different casino and have a very different experience – no themed games from what we could see. Once you move away from either the shopping malls (like in Caesar’s or the Venetian) where it has a clear identity, and move on to the casino floor, they’re all very much the same. The same tables, the same virtual games. The only thing that might change is the minimum stake to play.

Half-forgetting that there was the Tropicana diagonally opposite NYNY, we headed over to “complete” the Strip (or as far as we were concerned, anyway). We played a little more roulette using my Excalibur winnings (I guess Vegas won, in the end), before heading back to NYNY for some dinner.

Burgers at Broadway Burger were on the menu tonight – finish our US trip with that staple of the American diet. Doing our best to avoid food envy, we both went for the Black and Blue Burger. The evening wore on and, as we were due at the airport for about 10pm, we headed over to Mandalay Bay. At the top of the hotel there’s a bar – the Foundation Room. It’s not rooftop but it has a balcony that looks straight down the Strip. So we headed up for some wine and take in the view, with the Strip’s lights becoming brighter as the sun went down behind the desert mountains in the distance. A perfect end to our week.

We caught the monorail from Mandalay Bay to Excalibur, bypassing Luxor, and had one last go on the slot machines. Rosie followed the golden rule of gambling – won a bit, lost a bit, won a bit more, lost a bit more. With nothing else on our to do list we headed back to NYNY to collect our bags, get a taxi and head over to the airport, the US leg of our honeymoon complete.