Vegas Baby!

Hey All,

We're currently out of the desert, and into the insanity that is Las Vegas. We're talking a town that never sleeps, and is huge on a scale i've never seen before. I'm not saying it's the biggest town ever, but it is over the top. Basically everything here is open 24/7... We're at an RV park called Sam's Town, and it's pretty sweet. Opposite is a Super Walmart: it's the size of a massive (i mean MASSIVE: twice the size of a Campbells back home) aircraft carrier, and inside is everything, including a 24 hours Maccas. So, in Vegas, 15 mins away from the centre, there are 24 hour shops, 24 hour chemists, 24 hour everythings. And we're not even in the middle of town. I'll pop a few photos up soon.

On the strip is a half scale Eiffel Tour, a ful scale Arc De Triumph, and massive "fountain" the size of a lake, which has syncronised light/water shows every half hour. I'm talking about water shooting up 50m into the air, with light playing off some of the shots, at certain times in time with the music. Serious amazing.

At the moment in LV on the strip, there is a construction site. Now, as it's vegas, they don't do anything by half measures: there are more than 26 cranes working on this site, with people there 24/7. It's the single biggest privately funded construction site in the world. One guy is putting up 8 billion dollars to make a set of buildings with a single objective: you can live in these buildings for years without having to do anything else anywhere else: it's completely self contained, and in theory you don't have to leave. Sorta like the World Tower on George St, except not crap. And it's huge. So very Vegas.

It's so freaking cold here it hurts: the wind is whistling off the Rockies, blowing dust everywhere, and chilling us to the core. Inside the casinos it's warm, artificial and generally numbing, while outside it's literally numbing.

The shopping in LV is stupid good: the outlet malls are basically 40-60% off everything. I was wandering through the French Connection Store, thinking "hey these prices are quite reasonable, I might get some stuff..." I then realised that they hadn't taken the 60% off yet! I picked up a bunch of stuff that cost me bugger all. The rest of the guys did a heap of shopping too: with leather jackets ($100), suits (3 tailored with shirts for $500) and so many other things that we're already running out of room in the RV.

For those in the know: Downtown Joey Brown is with us. We got him all sorts of jacked up last night, and he had to spend most of today sleeping it off.

Speaking of last night, we got destroyed. We started drinking, playing drinking games, and generally having fun. We decided to get in the hot tub. We had to climb the fence to get in, and it was all naked, but at 2am, it doesn't matter. We had a great time talking shit and dehydrating, and decided it would be a good time to get out when the sun came up. We were in a hot tub for 4 hours until 6am. Between us we polished off a couple of bottles of Jaeger, 2 cases of beer and some other random beers. Seriously, we were messy. Downtown was spewing, and we were all rough as guts the next morning.

Tonight we're planning on hitting a nice bar: Voodoo lounge. It's really classy, so we'll all have to get pimped out, but it'll be nice to try. Tomorrow is our first bowl game (Las Vegas Bowl: BYU Stormin Mormons vs UCLA Bruins) and we've got a BBQ, meat and beer ready for tomorrow. I'll keep you all posted. I don't know why the photos always go to the beginning of the post, but hey, it's better than not getting any right?

Keep sending the emails my way people, it's good to be reminded of reality in the middle of all this!

Dave