The well beaten path of Las Vegas Boulevard

I love to find surprises that are off the beaten path right. Well, Vegas is one of those cities where you generally don’t actually care about off the beaten path. You can do the same thing as every other bastard who’s ever been and still have the time of your life.

The fact is, even though you most likely won’t leave this one well-beaten road – Las Vegas Boulevard – there are a million ways you can still create your own story within this 4-mile strip. And most of those million ways will involve drinking, shopping, gambling or all three at once.

Related: if you’re not sure what to pack for Las Vegas, The Flashpacker Family has a great guide on their site.

A self-indulgent post about a self-indulgent city

The following is an excerpt from my 2011 travel journal of the first time I visited Vegas.

My road trip pals and I arrived in Vegas at around midnight, October 2 and were checked in by half past. The other three all said they were tired. In any other city, this would mean you’d go to bed because you most likely have a big day ahead. Not in Vegas.

So we had a few…3 generous shots of jäger and walked down the road through to explore. Already this is spiralling out of control and we’ve only just arrived.

We walked down the road through the Flamingo, Bill’s Gamblin’ Hall and Saloon, across the road to the Bellagio and Caesars. It was about this time we decided we wanted to play. Blackjack was our game and we wanted a $5 table. We crossed back to Bill’s Gamblin’ Hall, purchased a Newcastle Brown Ale glass which came with a free beer and found an empty table.

The other three had never gambled in a casino before and I hadn’t either. Well, at least not well.

My friend Ivy didn’t play but she enjoyed watching us. I think I put on 20 and took 60 home. The others were also up by similar amounts and at 2:55 we said we’d go at 3.

So when we felt we had sufficiently cleaned out the casino we went back to our hotel, the Imperial Palace. As we were walking through the floor we saw another $5 table. We took it as a sign from the Lord and needless to say it didn’t take us long to get our wallets out.

I put on another 20 and an hour later left the table with around 75, leaving me $85 up for the evening. Not bad for an evenings work. For those playing at home, our ‘few drinks and quick walk’ got us back to bed by 4 am. Not too bad by Vegas standards I suppose.

Got time for a quick pin? Just hover.

We crashed pretty hard and woke up around 10 and slowly, quite slowly, got ready to see the city. This time we walked north. On the way up we bought $80 tickets to David Copperfield for the night. We walked past the Venetian; which tries to replicate Venice and does a pretty damn good job of it.

Very cool how realistic the sky is, even by making it look like the clouds are moving in our peripherals. When we got to the Wynn, time was getting on so we decided to have lunch around 3 so we could have dinner after the show. We crossed at Fashion Show and walked back towards the hotel through Treasure Island, stopping at Harrah’s to learn how to play craps since we found a $5 table…our favourite kind.

We had pizza (by the slice, the best kind) for lunch in our hotel then on the way to our room Ivy and I got a 32oz margarita in a souvenir cup for $14. A Las Vegas staple. By this time it was absolutely pouring outside so we chilled in the room for a bit and when we got there I poured myself a Jäger and Red Bull… and also opened a beer. Yep, I was triple fisting.

I finished the jäger and poured the margarita into a disposable cup so I could walk with both of them (classy as hell right?). With the drinks we walked through the casino and into the street where not surprisingly we ended up at our $5 table at Bills where a dealer called Michael was laughing at us (in a fun way I guess, I hope) at how bad we were playing but was also giving us tips on what to do and how to play the odds in your favour. (Who knew doubling down on a 12 wasn’t smart play?).

Before this point we were unsure about the drinks situation while at the table. Turns out, if you ask for a drink you get a drink, and it’s frowned upon to not tip your waitress, after all she’s bringing you free drinks. And quite often they’ll just bring you what your having if they think you’re probably done with that one.

Mick even had one waiting for him when he came back from the bathroom. We could use this kind of hospitality in Australia for sure.

We ambled up the strip and got to the MGM around 7 ready for Copperfield who absolutely blew your mind. I won’t go through his entire show because you should go see it for yourself but one small trick I really enjoyed was a card trick he did: he got an audience member to pick a card and shuffle it back into the deck. Then he fanned them out and got a scorpion to pick the card out. Absolutely phenomenal show. Well worth the 80 bucks.

After the show we had a late dinner at Outback Steakhouse, apparently, it’s an Australian themed restaurant. Well, it had some didgeridoos and a cutout of the map but that was about it. The menu even said shrimp on it and nothing on the menu was inherently different from what we’d had at other restaurants. It was nice, just nothing Australian and not that cheap either.

The whole time we’d been in Vegas I’d been saying I want to play some poker because really, you’re in Vegas, you gotta play some poker. And when you think poker, you think Bellagio. But first we walked through New York New York, though I don’t think they even had a poker room. So we went and watched the fountain display which was beautiful, and headed inside.

Ok truth be told we were never expecting to play there. We just went inside because Ivy wanted something from Tiffany and I wanted a pack of cards. Mick and I told Ivy we’d go investigate the poker room and meet her on the way back from the shop.

Well, we found out they had $1-2 tables which is what we wanted, so we just stayed and Ivy found us not long after. Minimum buy-in was $100 so naturally, I started playing very conservatively.

Long story short I tripled my money with my favourite hand, plus received many a free drink. We played until about 1:30am. On the way back to the hotel we stopped at Bill’s for some more $5 blackjack for a brief hour and a half before having a sneaky beer back in the room.

We woke up feeling very mediocre but not actually too bad considering the 12-hour streak from last night. We checked out and hit the outlet mall, but only for 40 mins as we needed to get on the road to Death Valley. Death Valley is incredible and you can read all about the continuation of this road trip where we actually do get off the beaten path with my post Searching for Yosemite Sam.

If you’re heading to Las Vegas the only site I’d use is Booking.com. They have free cancellation on most rooms (which I’ve actually used and it was no hassle at all). Lock something in then see if you get a better offer.


Booking.com

---

Did you enjoy this post?

Make sure to sign up for the mailing list to never miss the next one.