No lions either

Las Vegas truly is the city that never sleeps. I thought that if I headed out to the street before 7AM I could get a shot similar to the ones I have taken at heavily visited tourist attractions in Paris that have no people in the photo.

Nope.

Still, that is remarkably few people to appear in any photo taken on  the Strip.  By noon the street scene is a teeming mass.  By 10pm it is a mob scene.

I was up, the attendant wasn't. I ducked over to Bally's to play some poker. Since yesterday I had determined that the next door to each other Paris and Bally's are two arms of the same corporate entity. At the end of the hallway containing all of the restaurants inside the Paris is a seamless merger into the end of a hallway leading directly onto the floor of Bally's casino. Paris is not so much a separate hotel and casino as it is a second hotel tower at Bally's (with an auxiliary but slightly limited casino). While investigating this discovery I became aware that both hotels are subsidiaries of Caesars Palace. In fact there is a whole raft of hotels and casinos in the immediate area which are all part of the Caesar's Entertainment empire.

So anyway, the Bally's poker room promised a tobacco use forbidden atmosphere (something a bit hard to come by in this town) which was the deciding factor in making it my poker room of choice. I rather abruptly blew through my poker stake with a run of cards best described as toxic. I never had a pair. I had weak A a couple of times and K-J twice. Those are not good hands. I tried to limp in here and there but most hands were being raised. I saw probably half a dozen flops and never was in a hand to show down until the last one I played. Down to my last few chips I found A-J in the hole, called the bet and saw a flop.  It came 8-9-10 giving me a straight draw and top pair draw. I pushed the rest of my now meager pile into the pot.  I had so few chips by this point that I drew two calls.

One of them was pocket Jacks.  That gave him the same straight draw that I had and, fairly obviously, top pair.

I headed back to Paris and on a lark settled into a $5 minimum very small stakes roulette table.  I hit one of my numbers (24) on the first spin for $36.  I only played for about a half hour before the attendant called my phone with news that she was ready to face the day.  At that point the croupier was changing anyway so I gave him some of my chips and cashed the rest in.  I had slightly more than doubled my money at roulette.

Mostly correct but clearly not always Borch Map Company $9 map of Las Vegas for scale.

Further, our previously never in error guide had highly recommended the lion habitat show at the MGM Grand. From the Paris the MGM is a walk that while not longish also does not qualify as short. We wanted some exercise so we headed out.

Alas.

Not to blame the guide. Informed of this calamity by her moo the guide was herself quite appalled and in fact provided me via e-mail with the link to the Las Vegas Sun.

So we were a shortish/longish bit from home base and it was starting to warm up on its way to more than a hundred. We decided to cross the street from the side we had walked mostly out of doors to the MGM to the side where it looked like we could do quite a bit of the walking inside casinos.

Here's a pretty unusual shot. I walked halfway down the steps next to the escalator, lined up the shot and then signaled to the fellow traveler to come on down on the escalator, a place she is only very rarely found (you can't count the steps on the escalator).

As noted previously about la Tour Eiffel and le Arc d'Triomphe, even vaguely knowledgeable observers will know that it is not actually possible to get the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building easily into the same shot when you are in the actual New York, New York.

There was a tram that took us on the part of our return trip from the Monte Carlo to the Bellagio (I am strongly  suspicious of interlocking ownership over there too).  Fellow Traveler had been in the Conservatory at the Bellagio last evening and wanted to look in again.

It IS quite nice for a hotel but considerably less impressive than what we have available right there in Como Park.

This is one for the girls I guess.   Apparently when together they go on and on about leaning on the lamp post at the corner of the street in case a certain little lady comes by.  This reference will be completely Greek to anyone unfamiliar with the career and musical catalog of Herman's Hermits.

So completely unplanned by me, we discovered last evening watching the Las Vegas evening news about the upcoming annular solar eclipse.  All conditions are correct for a total eclipse on Sunday except that the moon is currently at an extreme distance from the earth meaning that even at full eclipse the entire sun will not be covered, there will be a rim of the sun visible around the edge of the moon.  Still, it should be pretty impressive and this is as close as we are likely to be, particularly by accident, to a total eclipse.  How's that for serendipity?

We were discussing total eclipse of the sun when the wise acre in my company remarked that at least it wasn't a total eclipse of the heart.  I know I have posted this before and it is linked over there on my sidebar but in view of her comment here it is again, Norway's most famous appliance band, Hurra Torpedo, doing Total Eclipse of the Heart.

That's all for this time.