Just as a heads up, this is not going to be a story of Hangover proportions, nor did anything happen in Vegas that we hope stayed there. We came, spent one night, saw enough and left. End of story. I'll elaborate it a bit below, but that's pretty much all there is to it. We're just not party people…

Anyway, we just couldn't do a road trip in western United States without visiting Las Vegas. I guess it's mandatory in some elementary way to go see the lights of Sin City if you happen to be anywhere in the neighborhood. So that's where we went, starting out from Hurricane in Utah after seeing Zion National Park. Following highway 9 west we soon came to I-15 and took it south into Arizona and finally Nevada. It was a pretty straightforward route which took us to Las Vegas fairly quickly.

We had made reservations for our stay in Vegas with help from my mother, by texting her our wishes to be made reality over the internet. We've had the same problem we had in New Zealand with finding free wifi, it just doesn't exist here. Even cellphone service is limited in many places, which we've found very surprising. In Finland you need to go way up there in the uninhabited north to lose your 3G signal… When service was available in Hurricane we asked my mother to reserve us a spot at the RV campground of Circus Circus Casino on Las Vegas Boulevard, or "The Strip". We already knew there was such a place and that it was supposed to be quite affordable. However it turned out that you really couldn't get the site for the advertised $36 (weekdays only). There were taxes of course, which brought the price up to about $40, but in addition to that you were also required to pay a "resort fee" of about $11 per person. The resort fee supposedly gave us benefits we would otherwise have lacked, but in reality we just got a little stack of coupons that were printed on such an unabsorbent paper that they weren't really usable even as toilet paper. We could get two cups of coffee free of charge, free access to the fitness room and a bunch of "spend X at Y to get free nachos"-types of discounts.

When we reached the campground we asked about the possibility of maybe spending another night in addition to the one we had booked and we found out that the resort fee is only mandatory for online reservations. So getting the site there would only have cost us just $40, taxes included. With that we would have gotten the same wifi and pool benefits as with the resort fee… The site we were provided with was pretty good, basically just a transformed parking lot, but we got full hook-ups which we used to the fullest by letting our roof AC cool our RV for the first time. It was awesome since the heat of the day was almost intolerable. Sini used the pool and found it pretty basic. The wifi worked well enough, but we had hoped for a little better this being, in theory, a fairly developed country. It was OK in Indonesian standards, but not in Thailand's, if that says anything…

We were a little disappointed to learn that we had paid $22 for absolutely nothing we could use, but oh well, we were in Vegas, you're supposed to lose your money there. To that end I used the included wifi to make one of the biggest screw ups we've made on this trip yet by reserving another accommodation in Iceland before cancelling the one we had made earlier. Later it turned out that neither could be cancelled. I might have gotten just a little bit pissed about that as well, but in hind sight, s**t happens.

I spent most of the day brooding about the mistake I'd made, which was probably as good a way to spend a day in Vegas as any. We drove on the Strip for just a little while before turning to Circus Circus Drive towards our motorpark and let me just say that Las Vegas looks a lot like a big city in the middle of a desert. That's what it is. Everything is gray, dry and faded, especially the pinkish purple color scheme of Circus Circus Casino. During the day that is. In the night everything is transformed into a splendor of light and colors, the air is hot and filled with wonder and the streets come alive with tourists carrying way more money than sense. We prepared for the night by putting on our best clothes, which for me meant jeans and a $3.58 black T-shirt I bought from Walmart. I seemed to fit right in with that. We started our tour with Circus Circus, entering through the main door into a world that was at the same time completely unknown to us and something almost familiar. Everything was as it should be: there were slot machines and table games on dark carpeted floor, the smoke of cigarettes in the air and a thousand tingly noises from all around. We walked around completely baffled by what we saw, unable to understand any of it. All of the slot machines are made to look attractive and lucrative, but there is no way of figuring out what you're supposed to do with them, other than to stuff them full of money. These were complex pieces of heavy machinery, designed to part people from their money while still retaining hopes of a possible pay day. In Vegas the house always wins, the games are built to take in more money than they give out. Regardless of this obvious fact I had planned on spending at least a few bucks to try a couple of them, but being unable to understand what I was supposed to do made me abandon this plan. Sadly we had missed the 2 p.m. free slots lesson… In the end we ended up winning the house however, by finding a $0.15 ticket someone had left uncashed on one of the slot machines. When we went to cash that we found four additional pennies from the payback machine, which brought our winnings to a staggering $0.19!

With the money burning a hole into our pockets we went upstairs to the family friendly section filled with amusement park style games. Here people were walking away with smiles on their faces and massive Despicable Me Minions in their hands. We didn't try those kinds of games either, to avoid the disappointment of not hitting the stack of cans, and most of all the horror of actually winning a teddy bear bigger than my wife. The main draw of the upstairs were the circus acts performed at regular intervals. We stuck around long enough to see two acts. In the first one a couple on roller blades and glittering costumes span around in a circle the size of a coffee table. In total disregard of his partner's safety the man would lift the woman in the air and spin her around, each time with less and less limbs touching each other until finally they brought out straps bought from one of the many well-advertised adult toy stores and had her spin on that. It was quite intriguing. Later we saw a young woman climb a couple of silk strips to the height of about five meters and perform death defying stunts from there. These acts were probably the best thing Vegas allows one to enjoy for free so I would highly recommend anyone doing a trip there to go see them.

We saw the indoors amusement park Adventuredome next without trying our any of the rides. I said this was going to be boring, didn't I? We didn't even have our wows renewed at the Chapel of the Fountain for just $120 (a lovely wow renewal would have been $250 and a wedding would have been anywhere from $200 to $1.100). After that we were pretty much done with Circus Circus and got back on the Strip. We started walking south along the famous boulevard and realized that it's actually quite a bit longer than what it looks like in the maps. We passed a full block of construction sites and the Fashion Show shopping mall before reaching the next casino, the Treasure Island. We went in and found it to be exactly the same as Circus Circus, a somewhat dimly lit complex of tingling sensations. The casinos are confusing places, it's almost impossible to find your way out after you get closed in. After a while you realize that the only way you are ever going to make it out is to spend all of your life savings, have a massive public breakdown and have yourself escorted out of the premises. We found it was easier to just go against the current of happy looking people, who clearly had just arrived and thus were coming from the general direction of the doors. Once back on the Strip we continued south, passing the water themed Mirage on the way to Caesar's Palace. I had expected to see waitresses dressed in breastplates and helmets with brooms attached to them, but only found another faceless casino. Heading onwards we saw the finale of the massive light and water show in front of the Bellagio, which was just like in Ocean's Eleven. Across the street was the replica Eifel tower which most of whom haven't seen the original one would not believe is only about a quarter of its size.

Like I said before, Vegas was at the same time very familiar and very strange. I mentioned Ocean's Eleven, one of the many movies showing bits and pieces of the city, but a far better source of information had been Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. I learned English from playing video games. I played them a lot. GTA series is one of my all-time favorites and I was surprised to learn just how accurately they had recreated Las Vegas in the form of "Las Venturas". Monte Carlo, Excalibur and Luxor were among the casinos that were totally familiar to me even before seeing them, I had flown my jetpack over them several times after all.

We returned to Circus Circus via the other side of the Strip which seemed a lot less busy even though it still had its fair share of tourists taking pictures with busty women dressed up as naughty police officers. In the end "Sin City" failed to impress with its wilder side, but then again we never left the Strip. Sure they were advertising brothels and strip clubs in every street corner and the ground was covered with leaflets picturing naked women with small stars covering the good parts, but it was still pretty tame. In Cambodia the hookers grab you by the arm and start telling about their air-conditioned "massage rooms" in broad daylight. Walk a mile in pre-earthquake Kathmandu and you get offered pot from two dozed sources. Walk down a street in Helsinki at 1 a.m. on a Saturday and you stumble on people who have taken the party a way further than anyone we saw walking the Strip. People weren't even that drunk. We returned to our car sometime after midnight so I guess things might have heated up a little after that, but still.

With that we were done with Vegas. We were glad we saw it but didn't find anything we would have liked to spend too much money on. If you wish to do that there are probably about five million things to keep you busy: R-rated acts in Cirque du Soleil, listening to Olivia Newton-John, shooting stuff at a gun range, having a Q-tip stuck inside your pee-hole to see what grows there after visiting a brothel… Fun stuff like that. If we ever come back I'll make sure to take the free slots lesson and to try the machines. Then I'll go Rain Man on them and beat the house for real in black jack.

That's another good way to find your way out of a casino.