"Welcome to Sin City...!"

It didn`t take long for the temperature to start building as I approached the Mohave Desert and pretty soon it was pushing into the 90`s. After a couple of hours riding (and sweating!) the outskirts of the city began to appear, or more accurately, the casinos began to appear! Huge hotel complexes with their own roller coasters (obviously, a mandatory appendage) just springing up out of the desert. Almost surreal. As I entered the city, the temperature was now over 100°.



I`d sourced a hotel online that was offering a good deal on room rates, the aptly named “Sahara” hotel. It was one of the original hotels/casinos on the strip (many years ago!). In its heyday, it was the place to stay. The “Rat Pack”, The Beatles and anybody who was anybody had stayed there. Now it was my turn! At the front desk I was informed by a rather surly receptionist that the rate was in fact higher than I`d expected (tax for this and taxes for that, extra for wifi) so I decided to try elsewhere, after all Vegas is full of hotels/motels. An hour later, after a fruitless, hot and sticky tour of the south strip with temperatures now at 104º, I returned to The Sahara and checked in! After a very welcome shower, I was eager to get out and explore this very strange, but oddly compelling place. The hotels are designed to create a self sufficient environment. If you want to gamble, you need never leave your hotel. You can get everything you want under one roof, food, drink, clothes, haircut,tattoos (yes, for some reason the tattoo business in Las Vegas is huge)and of course, show tickets. At any given time there are 100`s of shows taking place at hotels around the city. At The sahara that night they had a comedy club, so that was my evening`s entertainment taken care of and I didn`t need to leave my hotel! They even had huge banks of screens showing live baseball, football, basketball, horse racing and any sport that you can bet on and people would spend several hours watching the games having placed bets on the outcome. That`s it!That`s pretty much all they would do. I don`t think some of them ever left that part of the hotel!! Eventually, after sampling the mandatory $1 beer (every bottle top contributed 10 cents for returning veterans, so I felt I was doing my bit for the boys), I forced myself away from the seduction of the Sahara and ventured further afield. Across the road I noticed a barber shop so decided to get a "Vegas Cut" (AKA a number 5 all over!). $35 for a haircut! Obviously, I asked for a better deal and was told, "Come back tomorrow. We do 1/2 price cuts on Wednesday". So Wednesday it was! Stepping out of the beautifully air conditioned hotel into the 100° + furnace was always a shock to the system, but I needed to explore the “strip”, so I bought a 24 hr bus pass and headed for where the rich and famous spend their money. The Bellagio and Caesar`s Palace were clearly object lessons in decadence and made The Sahara look distinctly shabby. Across the strip,I stared in disbelief at The Eiffel Tower hotel – yes, they`ve built their own version! Welcome to Las Vegas, the city where anything is possible! Someone must have gathered a bunch of designers and architects and said, “O.K. guys, money no object, see what you can come up with”. And believe me, they did. Each new hotel, bigger, better, more opulent and outrageous than the one before. Having done my duty representing the English (since there was a distinct shortage of Mad Dogs), I retreated to the cool of O`Neills Casino (or was it O`Reilly`s? Not sure, but it did have a digital counter on the wall counting down the days to the next St. Patrick`s Day) for another $1 beer . I watched with fascination as a steady stream of punters wandered from casino to casino dodging the line of little Mexicans wearing T shirts emblazoned with, “Hot Babes! Girls to your door in 20 mins”. In one 20 yard stretch, I was handed about 40 cards with pictures of beautifully airbrushed ladies and their telephone numbers. I was looking for someone to do swops with so I could collect the full set. Sadly, I had no takers so I finished my beer, left the cards on the bar and went back to my hotel to recover and plan my next outing – the strip by night! Las Vegas by night assaults your senses. It`s one of those things you have to do just once in your life! In a relatively cool 88º, I went down to The Bellagio and watched the fountain display, got discounted tickets for a show called The Mentalist (a kind of American Derren Brown), and spent the rest of the night wandering around, soaking up the surreal atmosphere.




I wanted to get to bed before midnight because the next day would be an early start, so I headed back to the hotel and found the “Big Screen” group still waiting on the outcome of their bets on the live baseball. Happy that everyone was in their place doing what they should be doing in Las Vegas, I set my alarm for a 5.45 a.m. start. Leaving in 80° heat was as good as it was likely to get! Tomorrow I was heading for the little town of Seligman on the historic Route 66.