Viva Las Vegas!
Ahh, Las Vegas, to many the land of dreams where fortunes are won and lost on a roll of the dice and beautiful people in beautiful clothes with beautiful jewelry party the night away. We didn't go to that
As we recounted earlier in a hopefully helpful Frugal Hedonist article we took advantage of some really good deals to go to Vegas. Which turns out to be a good thing since I'm pretty sure we'd been rather unhappy paying full rack rate. Well, Mary's hates playing rack anywhere, but doubly so in Vegas. There was nothing wrong with the Wynn per se, other than the fact that any time you wanted to go to or from your room you had to pass through the casino and that always reeked badly of the noxious weed. The rooms were adequate - not five star lux, but a good upscale room that I'd be happy to stay in if I had to attend a conference for the American Association of Cereal Chemists (and no, I'm not making that up).
We tried gambling, we really did, but we suffer from a serious problem that causes issues with enjoying pretty much all forms of wagering. See we like statistics, wiling away the evenings with simple linear regressions and determining the confidence interval for a population mean. Other families do charades - what can I say? But the problem with statistics is that even the most cursory review of gambling reveals that over a sufficiently long run the casinos will always win and the suckers, umm, customers, will always lose. This tends make gambling not-fun to us. We did a little video poker and found ourselves bored within a few minutes. And moved on.
With gambling behind us that leaves partying, eating, and going to shows. We're too old and slow to survive the tooth and claw world of nightclubs in Vegas so we skipped that. We're really good at eating though so we did that. We like shows, so we did that too.
We liked Craftsteak a lot. The Winter Tasting Menu with wine pairing was an excellent deal, service was great, and the food very nice. Did I mention it was a great deal? We weren't as pleased with Daniel Boulud's one star Michelin restaurant in the Wynn but that's pretty much par for the course when it comes to us and Michelin starred restaurants. As far as we were concerned the food at Craftsteak was better, the ambiance was better, and the service was leaps and bounds better.
When we were not eating we checked out some shows. Like a traditional old school Vegas show (Jubilee!) with topless showgirls, singing, dancing, and headdresses with enough feathers to stuff a hundred thousand pillows. The highlight was a set piece based on the sinking of the Titanic. I was not aware that the female passengers in their panic ripped off their bodices, but that must have been a part of the historical record that filmmakers like James Cameron obscured in order to get a PG rating. The second show we saw with the immensely talented Wayne Brady was excellent, though the price was really higher than we were comfortable with.
All in all, I'm glad to say that we have finally done Vegas and can now cross that off our list. We won't be returning pretty much ever no matter how good the deal, since it really doesn't offer anything we like doing that we can't get somewhere else, only better. And we'll not miss the smell of cigarette smoke that seems to have permeated our very pores.
