Got any Raid?

I suppose everyone has been wondering why it’s taken me so long to update the blog today. (Has everyone been wondering? Or did no one notice? Maybe no one noticed…) I’ll explain all that in a second… Right now I’m on the 32nd floor of a brand new hotel in Las Vegas. And I mean BRAND new. It’s only been open a couple weeks. It’s so new that I’m not sure anyone has ever occupied this room. The towels still have little pilly lint balls on them because they haven’t been washed much. And there are advantages and disadvantages to staying in a hotel this new. Some of the pros: the bathroom is so clean that I’m not even thinking twice about walking barefoot through it. Usually when I get to a hotel, I immediately toss a few towels on the bathroom floor so my feet don’t touch any part of it. (I mean, do they ever really CLEAN the bathroom floor in a hotel room?) Another pro: the TV is a really cool flat-screen plasma thingy – the kind of TV that wouldn’t have even been available back when they built half the hotels in this city. And there’s a little bitty one in the bathroom, too. Which is cool, because when I’m walking barefoot across the squeaky clean tiles, I like to be entertained. Another thing I like is the décor – very modern and up-to-date. As I look out at some of the other hotels I can see from my balcony – Treasure Island, Aladdin, New York, New York – I imagine (although I don’t know for sure…) that the rooms in some of those places are a little more on the kitschy side.

Now for the cons: When a hotel is this new, there are bound to be bugs to work out. And we seem to have arrived in the middle of a very buggy time for this hotel. Some of the bugs have been pretty minor – it took at least a half-hour for our luggage to make its way up to our room when we checked in (although the porter was a Yankee fan from Brooklyn, so that had to be forgiven…), we didn’t have a room-service menu or amenity book in the room when we arrived, and a few of the TV channels don’t work. But a couple things have been a little more annoying – we had no internet access until about four o’clock today (even though we’re paying a “resort fee” that’s supposed to include high-speed internet), and, perhaps the most annoying thing of all – the little mini fridge in the room was making a horrible, intermittent noise all night. It sounded like a metal fan banging against another metal fan, and it woke us up a couple times in the middle of the night. So after several phone calls to the front desk and to maintenance, we finally seem to be online. AND (thank goodness) the horrible refrigerator noise has been squelched.

So this is the first chance I’ve gotten to update anything on the blog. The hotel we’re in is actually one of the quieter hotels around here – no casino in the lobby or anything like that. However, it’s directly across from the MGM Grand, and attached by a walkway, so we were able to just walk over there last night and check out the craziness of a crowded Vegas hangout. We ate dinner at the Wolfgang Puck Bar & Grill (VERY good), which is pretty much right in the middle of the MGM Grand casino. And today we walked around a little bit, and visited a few of the other hotels. They’re all set up in a similar way – shops, restaurants, and a big casino, laid out in a way that makes you think perhaps you’ve entered some kind of adult-oriented theme park. I have to say that after the small taste of the city I’ve had, Las Vegas may not necessarily be my kind of “thing.” It’s very noisy, very crowded, and very hot. It’s kind of like visiting a giant mall on Christmas Eve, with an added bonus of desert sand blown in your eyes when you’re walking down the street. And the whole thing is extremely manufactured – it really IS sort of like a weird kind of Disneyland for grown-ups. I’m not saying I wouldn’t come back, but I’d definitely try to come during the off-season (if Las Vegas HAS an off-season…) as the throngs of people have been a little disconcerting for me at times. (It’s like a Shy Person Nightmare…)

Rick knows several guys from work who claim that Las Vegas is their “favorite place in the world.” And all I can think, after visiting, is that these guys must have a very limited view of the world. I mean, it's certainly not the WORST place in the world -- but the best? Those guys must've never been to Maui…