Lost Vegas

Here's another of those rare double posts.

In this case the origin of the source material is my comment in response to a blog post at casinoguide.com. Rex appears to be the only person writing blog entries at the site, and that's fine. He has great stories and observations about living in Sin City, and posts them almost daily, some months more than once per day. If you enjoy Las Vegas, and want to know more than where the hottest ultra lounge action is going to be this weekend, Rex is your guy.

Here's the source material: Right here, Chachi!

Even if you don't read the blog entry, my lowercase comment tells a story on its own. Here it is:

when i was 26 i took my first trip to LV. my buddy and i stayed at MGM, got a good rate on a three-night weekend, enjoyed our time out and about and weren’t being fleeced at every turn up and down the strip. it helped that half-pound hot dogs were 99 cents at the boardwalk.

i’d heard about a few clubs around vegas, such as the beach. i went there once or twice. it was a dance place that wasn’t ridiculously priced. i didn’t feel like a sucker for the time i spent there one night with a few friends on a subsequent trip.

it was only logical that the casinos started working harder to get a piece of that action. somehow they convinced young morons that they wanted to overpay for anything and everything associated with a club, and thus the ultralounge was born.

perhaps the ultralounge is just a bi-product of the upscale positioning of every property on the strip.

now i’m an old man, 39 years old. i was raised catholic, so even when i was younger and in better shape than i am today, i was never the chiseled picture of superficiality that you see in “camp vegas” promos. seeing a promo like that makes me think that there’s no place for me in vegas.

years ago i started to realize that downtown was more my style. i was young and attracted to the allure of the strip. by my mid-30s the strip i knew was gone, and since i’m not getting rich in my old age, i have been rapidly priced off the strip.

in january 2007 i stayed two nights at greek isles, a small hotel a block off the strip. during a geocaching adventure i discovered the old beach club, now closed. of course it was, given its off-strip location. what a shame.

i like to do a lot of things besides gamble when i’m in vegas, sadly the strip is figuring less and less into that list.

maybe it’s OK to have an ultralounge in the downtown district, if it caters to the sensibilities of the downtown gambler.

live long and prosper, downtown, i’m too young to start vacationing in laughlin.