We were somewhere around Beatty on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. And it's a good job I had taken on some caffeiene as the combination of midday Death Valley sun and mercilessly straight roads being driven on cruise control was making me feel sleepy. We had left Stovepipe Wells (or Stovewell Pipes as Mellissa kept calling it) for Las Vegas about eleven o clock. We stopped at some sand dunes just up the road for some pictures, I'm guessing they had been the source of the previous days sand storm which had actually caused us to drive 20 mins straight past the ranch yesterday. Luckily the weather had cleared as the day wore on so we got to do some stargazing in the evening, probably one of the best places in the world to do it! Made a brief stop on the way to Las Vegas at a lonely RV station that of course had a brothel museum to accompany it's working brothel. It also had a load of crappy UFO merchandise in the shop as it claimed to be the last stop before Area 51.

Negotiated the freeways around Las Vegas to the hostel ok. Returned the car to the airport and caught the bus back to our hostel. I expected Vegas, particularly where our hostel was located, to be pretty seedy and we weren't disappointed. You can imagine what it's like but the reality takes on a grim aspect that you can't prepare for but which, as with any new place, dwindles with time. The hostel itself had a relaxed, ramshackle vibe and the dorms, resembling children's prison blocks with their barred windows and animated depictions of famous felines (the place was called Hostel Cat), circled a dusty, sparsely treed yard which would have been great for socialising if it weren't so damn cold. Took a siesta before joining the rest of the hostel on an outing to the club at the Tropicana casino. True to the style of the hostel everyone was given a lift by the owner, Chandler, in the back of his white van which was luxuriously decked out with an old mattress. The club was cool, straight out of CSI, but so were the prices. I may have accidentally paid $26 for 2 shots of Sambuca! This was unacceptable so we made a detour down the strip to buy cheap wine and some god-awful stuff called Joose from a 7/11. Now suitably intoxicated we had a great night and I even won 4 dollars on one of the gambling machines though I had no clue what I was supposed to be doing. Me 1, Vegas 0. Tucked the night up with a 5am visit to Denny's.

The following day was pretty much a write-off, we have no photos to show for it. Went to a casino cinema with some others from the hostel in the evening to watch the new Harold and Kumar film which was agreeably vulgar and amusing (worth it for the Neil Patrick Harris scene) and incorporated some interesting uses of 3D. What we thought was an ironic, obviously fake Disney-style opening involving swimming dolphins turned out to be the actual opening of Dolphin Tale which the projectionist had spooled by mistake.

So that was that, but at least we were relatively fresh for our early (5am) start to the Grand Canyon. Now the Grand Canyon is famous as a tourist attraction for it's sheer scale and the fantastic views. So we were a little disappointed to find the area around the canyon covered in mist and snow! No doubt it was still quite beautiful, we walked a couple of miles around the south rim and barely saw another person and got some great photos, but not in the way we would have expected. Luckily we had been tipped off that it would be cold, you would never have expected it given how sunny it was in Las Vegas, so had dressed accordingly. Back in Vegas, although tired from the massive journey to and from the canyon we hadn't really seen 'Vegas' yet so went walking on the main strip for a few hours. Took some photos, Walked in and out of loads of massive hotels and casinos, gambled a few dollars, watched the impressive water fountains outside the Bellagio (which was accompanied by the most nauseatingly patriotic country song imaginable, it could easily have been a Team America style spoof.....it had the line 'It's hard being an American but at least we're free'!!!....feck off!), good stuff!

Tuesday arrived and with nothing better to do we walked about the strip again, for about 8 hours. At this point Vegas fatigue was already beginning to set in. This may sound obvious but it's not the best place to be if you're surviving on a tight budget, and unless you have money to burn or are drunk it's a bit of a s*** hole with no real class that exists purely to rinse suckers of their money and probably a little bit of their soul! Still, enjoyed the walk, saw some lions at the MGM Grand where I also bet $10 on black, won and promptly walked away (though not before committing just about every conceivable gambling faux-pas; trying to hand the money over to the dealer despite already knowing and being told that you need to place the money on the table, trying to place a one dollar bet at what was a $10 minimum bet table, upon winning trying to walk away from the table with the actual chips rather than the cashier chips, turning down the offer of what was probably a free drink from the waitress, not tipping the dealer....LMFAO). Me 2, Vegas 0. Also scaled the 'Eiffel Tower' at the Paris Hilton for amazing views of the strip and wider Vegas. On the way back we rode the bus to Fremont Street, or Old Vegas. Enjoyed it there, less pretension to respectability and the impressive vaulted video screen running down Fremont Street was cool. the hostel was running a visit to a bar selling nickel beers, beers for a nickel!!! Really can't complain at that price so we drank a bunch of those, resisted the lure of the dancing cage and headed home about 2am.

One of the things we'd planned to do was to go to Circus Circus and the theme park there, so that's what we did on the next day (forget what day it was). It was passable, no queues and a decent roller-coaster, though the star attraction for us was the 4D Spongebob Squarepants ride thing. We discussed the possibilities for 4D horror films and decided that this was definitely the way forward, for shock-horror films. Once again travelled down the strip on the seemingly interminable Deuce bus that should be great but is actually the biggest time thief since ISS Pro Evo 2 on the PS1. Had heard about a happy hour sushi offer at the Mandalay Hotel so we headed all the way down there $5 for sushi at a really swanky restaurant in which we felt totally out of place. It was unsurprisingly delicious. I had reached $0, a bad place to be with Vegas circling. Chilled in the evening so that we'd be in good shape for the greyhound bus to LA in the morning....

This paragraph is being written roughly half an hour in to our 6-ish hour journey to LA. I'd like to take this opportunity to urge anyone who may ever contemplate using the Greyhound service to kill the idea with a well placed bullet in the eye. Firstly, they changed the time of our bus from 10.30 to 10 without informing us, although we'd booked the tickets months ago the service had changed in the interim. So when we rock up at 10 in good time we're informed that 'our' bus has already gone and the next one is at midday. Pretty annoyed about that, particularly as we should have been there 20 minutes earlier, but that's another story that I'm going to tell now. Some of the hostel workers offered a lift service to places you might want to go for between $5 and $10. Arranged for a half 9 lift to the station, stood in car park at 9.30 waiting, waiting for 15 minutes before asking another dude to check if our lift was still happening. It was, and a couple of minutes later our driver emerged from what was clearly a heavy and probably drug enhanced sleep with streaming eyes and a healthy appetite for the already opened bag of cheesy doritos lying on the floor of the car. With no other immediately available alternative we took the lift (I realise that if you try and do things on the cheap, well you get what you pay for, but I'm venting and it feels good so i'll continue). Secondly, after waiting 2 hours and getting in line to board like good little automatons the bus is waiting there with no driver. Everyone's wondering 'what's the hold up'. Eventually a passenger asks and the driver has not turned up for work, they're waiting for a replacement. This information, officially announced in a friendly way, would have been a massive psychological relief but no announcement was forthcoming. Eventually word spread that the driver was here and like a champion gladiator she arrived, tantalisingly out of touch and luckily earshot as she basked in the glow of our relief at her heroic appearance, completing her final checks at a speed specifically intended to antagonise me into shouting 'What the f*** are you doing in there?!!' And now here we are, no apology from anyone at Greyhound, no nothing! I'm writing this and exorcising my bad feelings, Mellissa is sat next to me wrapped up in two coats, starring at some chewing gum stuck to the seat in front and reminiscing about the time her sister Phillippa told another girl to stick her gum behind her ear and she did and had to have some of hair cut out to remove it (*she made me write it Phillippa!*)

Luckily the bus appears to be free of psychopaths, we've just enjoyed a bag of coconut M&M's for the first time, and the burning smell we noticed about 5 miles ago seems to have dissipated. All is good! As for Vegas, we're glad we went and there is undoubtedly something alluring about the place even if that thing is nothing more than the accumulation of relentless, self-promoting hype and bright lights.