Bright Light City #2

I'm back, and had a ton of fun.  Quite a bit of it was unexpected.

For starters, the planning issues I spoke about earlier took an unexpected twist.  My cousin and my friend spent pretty much the whole trip with me, sharing a two bed hotel room, with one of us sleeping on the floor.  As I was the one who paid for the hotel room, it wasn't me.

I expected to do a bit of gambling.  Normally I start gambling with the intention of losing some amount of money, then stopping.  I was so busy, I never really did much.  I stopped to do a few $3 pulls here and there, hit a $165 payout, and ended up leaving $50 or so up.  We also got a free walk through of how to play Craps, which was fun.

The Venetian is a hotel with some very expensive shops.  Normally I would have no business shopping there.  In a surprising turn, Godiva brought back my favorite candy bar, and a friend asked me to pick something up at Mont Blanc.  It was pretty neat doing some actually shopping at such a fancy place.

"How's your night going?"  It delighted me to no end being asked how my night was going, whenever I ran into someone before dawn.  I too have always considered dawn the start of a new day.

Something that really surprised me was Las Vegas is a city that definitely does sleep.  Walking around the city at 5:30 am, wishing that Starbucks was open, was not part of the plan.

Lyft surprised me.  They did the shared ride thing there.  It was kind of a gamble.  Once it added 30 minutes to my trip.  In general, it took about 10% longer, and saved a couple of bucks.  They were usually within 3 minutes, when I needed them.  And in Vegas it was a legitimate job; one you could support yourself on entirely.  Conversations were often interesting, and they knew a lot about the city.

Self driving cars.  They were around.  Probably mostly for CES, which had wrapped up a few days before I arrived.  Pretty cool to see people sitting in the driver seat, looking around the strip instead of where they were going.  Safely, of course.

I do want to talk about the shows, but that will be another post.