Look out! She’s preparing to fire!

(From the same visit as Lion around in Vegas.)

I’ve been posting old photos to Flickr lately, including some shots from a couple of trips to Las Vegas.

Like this shot of the Flying Saucer Mall — excuse me, the Fashion Show Mall. (I got the initials right!)

Seriously, doesn’t that view just say, “The visitors have landed?”

Maybe they’ll want some Alien Fresh Jerky.

It makes me want to headdesk.

Now, I don’t hate Vegas. I’m not ZOMG in love with it, but I’ve been there more than once and I don’t think it should be removed from the face of the earth. What I believe about Vegas is that it is a law and a destination unto itself, and that everyone should be able to choose whether they go based on the merits of the place, not on the merits of what else might be going on there that isn’t a usual part of the location. Please keep this in mind as I present my list of Reasons Not to Move CCI to Las Vegas:

1. Weather. San Diego may be incredibly hot some years, but it’s coastal. There are breezes a lot of the time, and it’s often quite bearable. Vegas is inland desert and is 99% guaranteed to be nasty hot in July/August. Part of the crazy fun of CCI is seeing costumes on the street, which would become darn near impossible for a lot of people given the temperature.

2. Distance. I’m not talking about the distance for people to get there (though I will in a bit), but the distance between things. It can take over half an hour to get from the front door of one hotel to the front door of the next one over. In San Diego, it’s pretty easy to leave the convention center, go find food that’s not jacked up in price for an inferior product, and come back. In Vegas, unless you take the monorail, that’s a pipe dream, especially given that the convention center is off the Strip and not really near a lot of hotels. Keep reading for more.

3. No public transportation. Well, not NO transportation. There’s the monorail, and there are buses. But the monorail only goes down one side of the Strip, and the traffic on the Strip itself, where the buses run, is a nightmare 24/7. The monorail is not convenient to get to; it runs down the backs of the hotels, and getting to the stations from the street, or vice versa, can take 20 minutes just by itself. (We timed.) Lots of hotels do have shuttle service, but it’s not huge, it’s not universal, and it’s not fantastic. Based on the masses of humanity I’ve seen at the SD Old Town trolley station, I doubt the monorail has enough cars to pack the schedule as full as they’d need to, and I doubt the shuttles will satisfy fans wanting to get to places at specific times. There would need to be charter buses, the way SD does it, but because this is Vegas, they would want either tickets or tips…probably both. Which brings me to:

4. Pay For Play. In Vegas, the dollar is still almighty. You can get a hotel room for $50 a night if you play it right, sure, but you don’t get the perks that identify you to the hotel’s amenities providers as a Good Customer. In some places, if you just want people to be polite to you, you have to pay them. In others, you just get dirty looks if you don’t tip. It’s been said that CCI wouldn’t make a dent in the normal daily Vegas people-traffic; if that’s true, then we’d all be running into this. Think it’s maddening to get slow service because a restaurant in the Gaslamp is full, or because you think you’ve been pegged as a low tipper? Try being in Vegas where they know whether you have spare change. Doesn’t matter if the place has only two parties in the section; if one of them is a Vegas regular and has paid to be part of their Premier Club, he’ll always get better service than the other party. I’m imagining the cheaper hotel restaurants being overrun with congoers who don’t understand the ethos (if you can even call it that); the saddest part is that if they voice any displeasure, they simply won’t be heard because all that’s happened is that they’ve run into how Vegas deals with those they perceive as cheapskates. They discourage you from coming back until you’re ready to spend. And,

5. Everything costs more. More accurately, it’s a case of the substandard being cheaper and the quality merchandise being more expensive. You can get a lot of pure crap for very little money, but you have to be willing to accept really crappy crap. Most stores are either souvenir dives or designer boutiques. I’d bet even the toothbrushes in most of the dives are emblazoned with “LAS VEGAS.”

And the food. Every megahotel in the vicinity of the Strip has a restaurant hierarchy. There is at least one posh place, one just a bit below it, one just a bit below that, a buffet, a theme bar, and a taco/burger/coffee stand. Most of the “nice” restaurants in SD are comparable in price to the lowest-price nice places in Vegas, and there aren’t nearly as many tony upscale spots. Not only that, but the cheap places are much greater in number in SD, and easier to get to (see #2 and 3 above). If there are more restaurants in a megahotel, there is usually a theme place that may be either very posh or very casual, followed by a doubling of one of the lower-priced ranks. They’ll also have bars around the casino floor(s), and occasionally a cookie or ice-cream shop. If the hotel is not a new “mega” type, they’ll have a coffee shop and a nice place, and some coffee/ice cream/burgers. The Stratosphere is the best for cheap eats, but it’s not close to anything. (The biggest souvenir shop in the city doesn’t count.) And at the other end of the Strip, the MGM Grand isn’t bad for it either, though their counter service is tucked away into the winding halls at the back of the place. Sure, there’s fast food dotted around here and there, but chances are that you’re not going to want to make the 45-minute trek to the McDonald’s when you can go a monorail stop away and find the cheap food in the hotels on the monorail line. Which will be mobbed, because nobody’s going to want to take the time to hike across the street and hunt through a megahotel for something they can afford.

Actually, there is one thing that doesn’t cost more: alcohol. Three guesses why.

6. No commuting. To those who come in from, say, Virginia, this may not sound like a big deal. But it’s just plain fact: there are fewer people living within 2 hours’ drive of Vegas than within 2 hours’ drive of SD. With the con in SD, people can even stay with friends (or in cheaper hotels) in LA, OC, or even Riverside, and take a train or other mass conveyance into town for the con. Not so easy in Vegas. Which means that a lot more people would be staying in town, filling up services and probably driving up hotel prices out of sheer demand. Another consideration: Hollywood is not close enough to Vegas for big-name stars to come out by bus for just one day. There’d have to be planes involved, or hotel stays; and with the way insurance works, the cost might be too great for the perceived benefit…especially considering how many lowlifes decide it’s their right and privilege to post exclusive footage to YouTube five minutes after it’s been aired. Dragon*Con suggests that there would still be plenty of star power, but such things as bringing in large portions of new movies’ casts might become much less feasible.

In the interest of fairness, there are a few reasons Vegas would be superior to SD for a giant con of any type:

1A. Parking. Vegas has parking. Acres of it, all over the place, for a lot less than you pay in SD. Anyone driving in would be able to park, for as long as they wanted, probably even wherever they wanted. Then again, #6 above might mean fewer people wanting to park in the first place.

2A. More floor space. The LVCC has nearly four times the floor space of the SD facility. To someone who’s been stuck in foot traffic on the floor at least once every year, this sounds like absolute heaven. Even if the con used only half the floor space available, prospects might be a little brighter for those of us slogging through the whole thing. On the flip side, they don’t have much more in the way of meeting room space; chances are, there’d be a bunch of exhibit space being used as the equivalent of Ballroom 20 and the 6A-F rooms. I’m not sure from the floor plan whether any of the large floor divisions is set up to be the equivalent of Hall H; I may need MeetingMatrix to find out. (Because only a meeting planner could ever possibly have a legitimate desire to know the details of the center.) Also, there are multiple small convention/event centers in Vegas; one of these could easily be used for, say, an exclusive screening of something at night. Ticket sales for 12,000 seats in the Mandalay Bay center would probably cover the rental cost and the rights, with some left over for the Cause of the Day.

3A. More hotel rooms. The Vegas visitor site boasts “over 140,000 hotel rooms,” which sounds fantastic. Throw in the fact that many congoers share rooms, and you have a recipe for much easier reservations than can be had in SD. Downside: the same room can vary in price by as much as $300 from Tuesday to Friday night, so you can bet they’ll be picking a more middling point on their scale for con-block reservations. And this is Vegas, so see #5 above. They’re going to do everything in their power to be sure their Premier Club regulars are able to get rooms if they want them.

If Las Vegas wants CCI, it’s in the way Irvine wants a university: they want the benefits without having the necessary people around. Congoers for CCI, by and large, are not well-heeled yuppies with expense accounts, and we are not there to spend our money at the blackjack tables. The Vegas I know is not enthusiastic about our kind of congoer overrunning its streets and its bars, and it has a much higher threshold for good financial behavior than San Diego—where we already fall short. Let’s do ourselves a favor and start looking for better solutions to the crunch.

So here’s the lighter side of our recent trip to Las Vegas.

Let’s start with the drive out. Somewhere between the Cajon Pass and Victorville, we saw a warehouse with this banner. We had to wonder what “really living” furniture was. Trees grown into the shape of chairs, perhaps? A topiary table? We didn’t get the camera out in time to snap a picture, but we caught it on the drive back.

Then there was the moving truck. Somewhere around Barstow we got caught behind this veeerrrryyyy sssslllooooowwwwwlllly moving truck, with the company name and phone number spray-painted on the back. We joked that it was “Henry’s Moving… slowly.” (About 45 MPH on a 65 or 75 MPH highway.) What was really odd was that, two hours out, we’d run into a car from our own area code. Once we could get out of the lane, we passed them and left them way behind. Perhaps 45-60 minutes later, we made a stop in Baker. Bathroom break, new drinks, top off the gas tank, and stop at Alien Fresh Jerky. We pulled onto the freeway…. and there was Henry’s Moving.

Speaking of Alien Fresh Jerky, perhaps they get their supplies from the flying saucer perched above Las Vegas’ Fashion Show Mall.

It’s actually a big ellipse, if you look at it from across the street, but approaching it from half a block down the strip, it looks like some aliens stopped by to shop, and couldn’t fit their spaceship in the parking garage.

On Tuesday, Katie noticed one of the buildings near Paris Las Vegas had a sign that said, “plan.” A day later, it said, “plane.” Once we realized they were in the process of putting up a new sign, we checked things out and discovered the Aladdin was being converted into the Planet Hollywood. One more Vegas icon bites the dust, (and one more joke from the Disney film gets dated). Sure enough, the next day it said “planet.” For some reason they didn’t continue on the next side on Friday.

Of course, even with all the newish hotels on the Strip like the Wynn, Venetian, Bellagio, Mandalay Bay, Trump whatever all trying to project an image of Las Vegas as a classy destination, there are still some remnants of more… shall we say, traditional Vegas entertainment, such as this sign on the New Frontier.

Now, I’m not so sure about the wisdom of eating seafood in the middle of the desert, but the Wild Wild West goes all-out: steak, shrimp, and eel! (though they spelled it kinda funny)

I recall someone talking about the Disney-fication of Las Vegas. Excalibur has the Fantasyland look going, and New York New York, Paris, the Venetian, and Rio all have areas that imitate their namesake cities like Main Street, U.S.A. or New Orleans Square. But I think Toon Town is taking things a bit far.

And finally, I’ll leave you with this image of a billboard above the “World’s Largest Gift Shop” which houses Toon Town. The motif for Souvenir Heaven seems singularly appropriate for Las Vegas.

We paused there as we passed through last Thursday afternoon, and overheard an announcement that they would be introducing a pair of lion cubs to the habitat the following morning. So Friday morning, after checking out of the hotel, we drove over to the MGM Grand to take a look at the lions again.

*Well, it used to be split between lions and The Wizard of Oz. It’s green because it was basically the Emerald City. Sometime between 1998 and 2005 they seem to have ripped out all the Oz stuff. Katie pointed out that they really missed their chance. If they’d kept the theme, Wickedmania would have brought them an entirely new class of Oz-seeking clientele.

We stayed at the Rio, which has very nice, huge rooms—even if we didn’t spend much time there. The casino floor is also surprisingly easy to navigate, unlike some of the mazes on the Strip. We’re probably the only people to stay there four nights and not to see the “Show in the Sky” (some vaguely Mardi Gras-ish production they do with floats that run on tracks in the ceiling).

Of course, it is a bit off the Strip:

But at least it wasn’t as far off as the last hotel we stayed at.

We managed to catch Spamalot (which replaced Avenue Q at the Wynn), Cirque du Soleil’s O (the one with the water), Penn & Teller’s magic show, and Jubilee! (a traditional-style Vegas extravaganza, and yes, the exclamation point is part of the title).

Spamalot is hilarious. It’s funny on its own, funnier if you’ve seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail, funnier if you’ve seen other Monty Python, and still funnier if you’re familiar with other Broadway shows. There are in-jokes everywhere, but they don’t overwhelm the out-jokes. O was also well worth the price. We’d wanted to see it back in 1998, when we first visited Las Vegas together (well, us and some friends), and were poor college students who couldn’t afford the tickets.

View from the Paris Las Vegas’ half-height Eiffel Tower

We also took in most of the strip, from the Tropicana up to the Stratosphere, went up the Eiffel Tower replica one night, saw an Ansel Adams photography exhibit at the Bellagio, and Bodies.. The Exhibition, a biology exhibit in which real human bodies were preserved, essentially turned into plastic, to display various aspects of human anatomy. We also stumbled upon the Lion Habitat at the MGM Grand (more about that in another post).

It started out relatively cold, in the 55-60° range, and slowly warmed up over the course of the week. It actually drizzled on us a bit on Tuesday. The hottest day that week wasn’t out in the desert, it was on Saturday, when we got back to within 10 miles of the coast. On the other hand, it was nothing compared to that 1998 trip, which was in December. 40°F and high winds.

All in all, it was a fun trip. Between the last trip and this one, we’ve pretty much seen most of the major hotel/casinos on the Strip (yeah, that won’t last), and neither of us gambles much (does putting $7 into penny slots count?), so our next visit will probably be stopping for the evening on the way to somewhere else. We’re thinking of catching one Cirque show per visit, or at least Kà and Mystère.

Some lessons:

• If you can take time off such that you don’t drive out on Friday and return on Sunday, do it. Driving back Friday afternoon, we saw the traffic out on the I-15. I was really glad I hadn’t had to drive it. Edit: This obviously only applies if you’re driving there, and may only apply to driving from Southern California.
• The Monorail is convenient for getting up and down the Strip… but only if you’re already on the east side, and can find your way to the back of the hotel with the nearest stop.
• Everything is bigger than it looks, and it will take longer than you expect to walk there. That includes getting from one end of a hotel to the other.
• Most shows have an early (7:00ish) and late (10:00ish) show. If you can stand staying up late, go for the late one. It’ll be easier to find time for things like dinner.

The drive to Las Vegas from southern California is simple: make your way to the 15, head north, and keep going until you get blinded by the neon. The ⅔ mark is Baker, CA, a small strip of restaurants, stores and gas stations in the middle of the desert, famous for the Bun Boy and the world’s tallest thermometer. Baker has something new: Alien Fresh Jerky.

We were staying at the South Coast Hotel and Casino, the latest megasino to open, which is a bit off the strip. At first I was a bit worried about finding the right exit. As it turns out, it’s the first giant hotel you’ll see as you approach Las Vegas from the south…about two miles before you actually have a chance to get off the freeway! (They have a free shuttle to the strip, though that had its own share of problems.) They put us in a room on the 24th floor, which had a great view of suburban South Las Vegas.

Of course, the room had its oddities, like this soap which looked like a LEGO brick.

And then there was what we found in the nightstand. Something about this combination just screamed “Las Vegas.”

One thing that constantly amazed me was the number of brand tie-ins in the casinos. The slot machines we saw were mostly video-based, which makes sense: you can change the theme by changing the sign and loading new software. But who would expect to find an I Dream of Jeannie slot machine? Or Alien? Star Wars just floored me. And I’m not sure I’d trust a Terminator slot machine! But the weirdest one had to be the Tabasco Sauce Slots:

Later on, we saw one of these in a kiosk labeled “Hot Slots,” but the photo was too blurry. That, and the slot machine in question was showing a Windows desktop and a command prompt instead of a slot matrix. (Hmm, now that I think about it, I wonder if this has anything to do with the high concentration of Windows installations that failed WGA validation in southern Nevada…)

We rode the Las Vegas Monorail a couple of times (more on that later). On Sunday, we noticed this sign outside the monorail entrance at the MGM Grand, advising us that they might search us due to the “heighten security level.” Someone had helpfully filled in the missing letters. As for the reason for the security: on Monday, our shuttle driver pointed out Air Force One sitting on the runway as we passed the airport. What are the odds of accidentally planning a vacation for the same week the President comes to town?

The main floor of New York-New York (AKA NY,NY,LV,NV)is done up as a Disneyland-style representation of the city. Off in the food court area, there’s a street sign that looks like it might be combining an early captain of the Enterprise with the captain of Babylon 5. That certainly looks like Christopher Pike and Sheridan to me…

Speaking of Star Trek, we did check out the Star Trek Experience and “Borg Invasion 4-D.” (We’d done the Klingon Encounter back when the other ride was the “Star Trek Experience.”) We passed on Quark’s this time, but discovered the gift shop sells Romulan Ale. The display proclaimed that they had just been smuggled across the Neutral Zone. We haven’t tried it yet, but we did pick up a couple of bottles for the heck of it.

Update: I forgot to include this one. We rode the monorail to and from the Las Vegas Hilton. While we waited or the train back to the strip, we grabbed a bottle of water at one of the vending machines. They’ve actually branded their bottled water as Monorail Water!

Another fandom tied into this sign on our hotel grounds. Don’t worry, Harry Potter fans: Neville has to make it through Book 7—he opens up a landscaping company!

Admittedly, Vegas is the land of (con)fusion, but we couldn’t quite figure out what to make of this one. It seemed to be a higher-class version of Taste of China: Hot Dog Heaven.

The Bellagio has a conservatory filled with topical plants, giant sculpted flowers, and large animal sculptures lined with flowers like Rose Parade floats. It was a very popular place for taking photos. Unfortunately, this fact was lost on many of the people not taking or posing for pictures, as you can see from the biker dude who wandered into the frame here. The woman taking our picture asked to see this one after she snapped a second, biker-free version, so we figured it was worth hanging onto for the humor value.

And finally, no geek trip would be complete without checking out the local Fry’s. We were kind of disappointed that the theme didn’t persist through the interior of the store, but the giant slot machine out front is hard to miss.

The South Coast Hotel* is so new that they’re still building things like the swimming pool. Being new, lots of things didn’t quite work right. The 42″ wide-screen TV was stuck on with no picture, so it glowed faintly in the dark until I unplugged it and plugged it back in. The water was so soft that you couldn’t rinse off in the shower. One drawer in the dresser just wouldn’t open.

The most bizarre was the whistling. Our first night in town, we noticed a whistling sound like water rushing through pipes, or like someone trying to blow across the top of a bottle. We figured someone in the next room over was taking a shower, but it kept going. The noise stopped when we opened the door, then started again when we closed it. Standing barefoot near the door, I could feel the air rushing in underneath it. It turned out the air pressure in the hallway was high enough that the air rushed in through the door jamb, creating a constant whistling sound.

So we blocked the jamb with a towel every night and slept soundly. But it wasn’t just our room. Every time we walked down the hallway, we could hear the sound coming from other doors as we passed them.

*We finally found out why it’s called South Coast when it’s hundreds of miles from anything resembling an ocean. (The Salton Sea doesn’t count.) The company also operates the Barbary Coast, Gold Coast, Sun Coast, and several other casinos in the city. The new one is farther south than… well, anything else in town, so: South Coast.

In four days we managed to see Avenue Q, “Pirates 4-D” (a cheesy 3-D pirate movie with Leslie Nielsen that even Eric Idle couldn’t save), a museum replica of Tut’s tomb at the Luxor, Cirque du Soleil’s Zumanity, Star Trek: Borg Invasion 4-D, an impressionist exhibit at the Bellagio, Excalibur’s “Tournament of Kings” (a Medieval Times–like dinner show), Rita Rudner, Treasure Island’s pirate show, and the Shark Reef aquarium at Mandalay Bay.

We also got to see how much Las Vegas had changed since the last time we were there, back in 1998. The hotel we stayed at last time (the Holiday Inn—we were college students on a budget) has been bulldozed. Several gigantic hotel/casinos have opened on the strip, and more off.

And for some reason, I don’t remember noticing all the mountains in the distance last time. Maybe it was too cloudy or hazy, or maybe it was just that we stayed off the strip this time and weren’t surrounded by buildings.