The Elvis Tour Rolls On

Las Vegas was magic when I was a kid. My dad and all his brothers and sister grew up there. My grandfather and several great aunts and uncles lived there. My parents took us out several times when we were still young. Our favorite place to stay was Circus Circus. While mom and dad ran off toward the siren call of the blackjack and craps tables, us kids ran amuck and watched the trapeze acrobats and dancing elephants and clowns being shot from a cannon.

Everything in Las Vegas is legal — gambling, booze, prostitution. You know, all those forbidden things that make the place so kid-friendly. Truly a place of wonder and amazement.

Vegas was also magic in my thirties, literal magic, with David Copperfield. I was on an audit assignment for my company at the time, and spent a couple hours visiting with my grandfather before catching Copperfield’s show at the MGM Grand. He made a car appear out of thin air, vanished himself from the front of the stage only to re-emerge seconds later at the back of the theater … clear up on the second floor balcony!

Magic in my fifties?

The place has changed a ton since my childhood, even more since I was there twenty years ago. Those famous lights you see down the strip? The ones all flashing and lighting up the dark and making the sidewalks twenty degrees hotter? They’re all gone. There are still lights to be sure. Every hotel has a giant marquee and usually some kind of ad screen taking up ten floors of their building. But it’s not the same.

For this trip, we stayed at the Excalibur. As a kid —  even as an adult visiting Sin City on the company’s expense account — I had no clue what Vegas was really all about. For me, it was all lights and mirrors and smoke (still lots of smoke because it’s still perfectly legal to light up inside the casinos) and shows and entertainment and hidden things and forbidden things and, of course, magic. But I saw through all that this time around. I saw it for what it really was: a trap to separate you from your money.

The outside of our hotel was pretty cool, shaped like colored castle turrets. Even the lobby just inside the main entrance was decorated with medieval furniture and stained glass windows and suits of armor. Venture beyond that though, say for instance, into your hotel room, and I was terribly disappointed. The place is designed to suck money from you. No microwave to reheat or cook any of your own food. No refrigerator to store your own drinks or stock them up for later. A tiny saucer of an ice bucket so you can’t even buy a cooler and keep your own things cold, although we did that anyway. The ice machine spits out enough ice to fill your eight ounce bucket, then kicks off for fifteen minutes so you can’t keep getting ice.

This was my family’s very first trip to Las Vegas. I wanted it to be special. I wanted to share with them some of that same magic I felt myself as a kid. We all had a good time, don’t get me wrong, but this wasn’t anything close to magic. This wasn’t even an illusion. At best, this was some cheap cardboard tricks and plastic props, the kind you’d buy your six-year old as a beginner set.

“Pick a card, kid. Any card.”
“I saw that card up your sleeve.”
“What? No, you didn’t. You didn’t see anything.”

The trip was really for our son, Camden, who is a huge Elvis fan, thanks to his grandmother and great-grandmother. Two years ago, we took him down to Graceland, so of course Vegas was the next stop on our tour. (At some point, I’m hoping Hawaii is next.) I think he found some of that magic in Vegas. We stepped inside the hotel and walked through the casino and he looked around in wonder, all glassy eyed, and told us, “Look at all the arcade games!”

I must admit that the architecture is still amazing. If you can imagine it, you can build it in Vegas. The lights at night from the Sphere and the Luxor and the Eiffel Tower are beautiful. Given unlimited access to cash, adults could still find magic here. Like Disney World for adults, except, you know, if Walt Disney worked for the mob and had a gambling problem.

Regardless of the temperatures out there (it was 105+ every day), we had a great time, despite my personal disillusionments with the place. Again, the trip was for Camden, and he had a great time. We swam in the hotel pool and Lake Mead to cool off, had great food, and I even met up with Rob Wilkins for lunch at a Mediterranean place, which was awesome, because it was the first time I had ever met him in person.

Below are a bunch of pictures. What places excite your imagination, and where will your next adventure take you?