Around The World In 80 Waves

I actually get to the outskirts of Vegas a day earlier than expected, but to save on a bit of cash I decide to spend a night in the car. When I wake up at 4am with my teeth chattering and the thermometer in the car registering -5C I relise that might have been a mistake! The heated seats and the fan heaters soon sort me out, and after a healthy diner breakfast I check into my hotel that is a block back from Las Vegas Boulevard, which is known as the Strip.

My hotel room has fridge, kettle, two kingsize beds, cable TV, Quick wi-fi and a private bathroom including a bath and only cost £25 a night, so why I didn’t check in a day early I cant say. I treat myself to my first proper soak in about four weeks, because I simply have not had access to a private bathroom, a bath tub or hot water in abundance. Showers are great but this is heaven!

After settling in to my home for the next week I catch up on blog admin and do some shopping for some of the things I will need here an later on my travels. However Vegas is really all about the action at night and the bright lights that go with that so I cant wait to get out and check the strip out. It is possibly the worst place in the world to ba an astronomer because of all the light pollution. You can see the town from about 50 miles away!

It is all very amusing and I do my usual thing of starting at one end of town and walking through checking out everything on the way. It seems hard to believe that less than a hundred years ago only 35 people lived here.

I have never been a huge gambler after learning my lesson from pumping far too much of my hard earned paper round salary into the Golden Goose amusement arcade on Llandudno Pier, and Las Vegas is really only that on steroids. A vast and bewildering array of different ways and themes under which casinos have every intention of making you part with your hard earned money.

Despite statistical probability being overwhelmingly in the casino’s favour I am still willing to chance a few quid and have a lot of fun, as well as enjoying a skinfull of free drinks, as I slowly fritter away the $60 I allow myself playing blackjack and roulette in the Excalibur pictured here.

However looking around at all the other people throwing their cash away with all their might I think there must be some residual effect from the nuclear tests that were undertaken here in the 40s and 50s, which affects peoples ability to think clearly. It is staggering by today’s standards that hotel guests regularly used to come out of the casinos to marvel at the mushroom clouds racing up into the night sky a little way down the valley!

It probably says something about me that of all the places I visit I am most impressed by the Harley Davidson Cafe which has a number of classic Bikes circulating the restaurant suspended from a giant conveyor belt on the ceiling.

It has been a long held ambition of mine to get hold of a Harley and take it for a huge blat across the desert, but outside of the hours between 10am and 4pm, when it is about 60C, it is properly baltic here at the moment and there is ice all over the place. As a consequence I think that dream will have to wait for another time, but it might be a good thing if my own experience were to be anything like Evel Knievel’s on his Harley when trying to jump the fountains at Caesar’s Palace in the 1970s (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYGGCVE2lKY). He broke almost every bone in his body.