As I mentioned yesterday, I couldn’t find a hotel with coin-on laundry. No way in heck are we paying for hotel laundry service - I almost fell for it when I was traveling in China once, and they charge you per-item. Insanity! We walked 12 minutes to a laundromat (Busy Bee Laundromat) and received the best customer service, ever. We loaded up backpacking packs with our soiled clothes, and apparently when we walked in we looked like German backpackers so the man below approached us and asked us if we needed help. He was incredibly helpful, talkative, and full of good recommendations. With it being Pi Day (3/14), he delivered us a pizza recommendation (Pizza Rock) and we ended up having some of the best pizza ever there. Thank you, Busy Bee!
$5 for a full load of laundry, aw yis
The view from our hotel
At the hotel. If you know you know.
The hotel we stayed at was walking distance from the Fremont St experience, which was AWESOME! The hotel itself was fantastic, but I forgot that you can smoke indoors in casinos (of course the hotel is a casino) and I would start to develop a headache if we spent more than 20 minutes in the casino. We were given a $5 blackjack credit when we checked in to the hotel, but momma didn’t raise no fool - Jason and I didn’t use our credit, in fact, we didn’t play a single casino game. We did go to all you can eat sushi for $35 each, and Jason was astounded - “Claire - I’ve never seen you eat this much!”. I think I was mildly famished from subsisting on tortillas and packaged tuna for the past few days of all-day climbing adventures.
An ode to nearby Red Rock Canyon - or just art?
Perhaps peyote, perhaps your garden variety cactus
Do you spy King Kong?
A frequent response I’ve been getting from Jason when I ask, “what do you want to do today?” is: “get wasted and eat chicken fingies”. It has been a joke, in contrast with our actual agenda of wake up early and tackle trad multipitch rock climbing until nightfall but today we decided to actually get drunk. After all - we didn’t have to drive anywhere, we had free drink coupons (no coincidence that you get a drink coupon and $5 credit to play blackjack when you check into the hotel…drinking makes the gambling losses go down easier), and when in Vegas, right?
We had fun- we listened to live piano music at the casino, danced to throwback music in our hotel room, and explored Fremont St. Not pictured are the dozens of women in stilettos and fishnet tights who will whip you if you pay them. Jason leaned towards me and whispered, “Vegas seems to cater to men, doesn’t it?”. I solemnly nodded and one of the sexy ladies gave me a wink. Maybe Vegas caters to straight men, or maybe it’s a vestige of days past when Vegas was a…wait, what is Vegas’s origin story? I have no clue. I was thinking of the Gold Rush which brought out men to the West and women followed later, yes I know I’m being heteronormative right now, but I can name 1 gay cowboy movie in contrast to countless Westerns with damsels in distress.
Eventually we wandered back to the hotel and decided to go to sleep, figuring it must be at least midnight, which is how late we stayed out the night before. As you can see below, we didn’t quite make it to midnight. The hotel swayed and buckled under the loud bass of nearby live music until ~3am, but earplugs combined with over the ear headphones canceled out most of the noise. We got good enough sleep, relished in the creature comfort of a soft, clean bed, and showered the next morning, loving the feeling of hot water cascading down our backs. Ten days of no showering and minimal room to sprawl out made our hotel stay feel well-earned and quite luxurious. Tomorrow we leave Las Vegas - bound for Salt Lake City, our second stage of our three-stage van trip (Vegas—>SLC—->Moab/Indian Creek).
