Pyramid
Started: 2023-11-06 20:48:55
Submitted: 2023-11-06 22:36:38
Visibility: World-readable
A quick weekend trip to Las Vegas
This year I discovered live music at Catalyst in Santa Cruz; so far this year I've seen six shows at Catalyst without having to drive over the mountain. Some of the bands I've heard of before; most of them I haven't. I don't need a connection to a band's music to enjoy their show; but if I enjoy the music I'll get more out of the show. So I started looking up bands and artists I've listened to for years to see what they were up to and whether they were out on tour. I looked up U2 and discovered that, instead of a tour, this fall they were playing an entire residency in Las Vegas, at a fancy new venue called the Sphere, covered with a giant LED display inside and out, the sort of thing that could only exist in Las Vegas.
It did not take me very long to decide that I needed to travel to Las Vegas this fall to see U2.
By the time I got around to actually buying my ticket everyone else had heard of the show and the direct-sale tickets had just about run out, leaving the secondary markets. So I went to Stubhub and tried to figure out which of dates I actually wanted to see the show and where I wanted to sit, and ended up picking the first Friday in November. I have no idea what the face value of my ticket was, or what the seller paid for it, or why they sold it to me, or whether they were scalping the tickets they picked up in a presale. All I know for sure is that, shortly after typing my credit card number into Stubhub and clicking "Purchase", I got an email from Ticketmaster to accept the transfer of the ticket, and then it showed up in my account looking very authentic and giving me hope that it would actually work.
I decided to fly into Las Vegas after work on Thursday and take Friday off work before the show. Then it turned out that I could pay about half as much for my flight if I returned on Saturday evening rather than Sunday evening, which seemed reasonable. I picked an evening Southwest flight out of San Jose (they seemed to be running shuttle flights almost every hour). This let me drop by my employer's office (now in Santa Clara) for the day before heading to the airport with plenty of time to get supper and catch my short flight to Las Vegas.
We descended into Las Vegas with a great view of the Strip out my window. I could see the Sphere glowing and pulsing, and the High Roller observation wheel, and the lights running up the side of the Luxor pyramid. (The dark area on the right of the picture is the airport itself; we flew past the airport heading east, then looped back to land to the west.)
Once we landed I set out to find the shuttle to the rental car facility. Las Vegas has built a big consolidated rental car facility, but it's on the other side of the airport and the line to the shuttle on the curb in front of the airport had wrapped back on itself. Buses showed up intermittently to pick up people at the head of the line. When I reached the rental car facility I picked up my car, a Hyundai Kona EV, which seemed like an interesting idea when the car reservation gave me the option of picking a compact EV for $5 more than a gasoline-powered car.
(You may notice at the corner of the dashboard the car indicates that it is about one-third charged, with an estimated range of 107 miles, by the time I drove a couple of miles to my hotel. This was not the most auspicious introduction to electric vehicles, but it worked out.)
For this trip I decided to stay at the Luxor, on the southern end of the Strip. This particular hotel has a special place in my heart because it's where, twenty-three years ago this month, Kiesa and I made our way into the stairs and climbed all the way to the top of the pyramid, then took the elevator back down. This time I had an actual room card, so I could ride the inclinator (not an elevator, because it climbed at a 39° angle up the corners of the pyramid; every time the inclinator started it jostled sideways as it accelerated) at to my room on the tenth floor, and try not to look down over the edge of the railing into the atrium below.
Each floor overhung a bit over the floor below it, so the view from the hallway running along the interior of the atrium was a bit constrained. The atrium itself was filled with buildings for shows and exhibits on the floor, plus a food court in the corner under my room. From the tenth floor I could smell food being cooked below, mixed with the cigarette smoke from the casino floor one level below the atrium, which combined in a mildly unpleasant aroma.
From my floor I had to walk all the way along the length of one side of the pyramid to reach my room. The inclinators are located in the corners of the pyramid, divided into banks so my room was near the express elevators to higher floors that skipped my floor. I ended up with a junior suite in the corner, with a bit more space because the room occupied a triangular corner section, which room allocated as a sitting area under the tinted exterior glass facing the pyramid.
After checking in and finding my room, I went back into the casino to watch gambling in action. At midnight on Thursday there were a bunch of tables playing blackjack and a couple of tables playing poker, plus craps and roulette. I only know enough about poker and blackjack to be dangerous, so I was happy to stand and watch and try to figure out what was going on. I watched a few games then headed back up to my room for the night.
