What Happens in Vegas …

4th of July Weekend 1983

It was a long, 900-mile (1,440 km) roundtrip drive to Las Vegas, Nevada for just a weekend, but what can you do when you don’t have any accumulated vacation days at work.  At least it was a straight shot down I-15 and a reasonably easy drive to boot.

We left Kaysville mid-afternoon on Friday and reached Vegas shortly before midnight.  On the silver lining side, arriving in the “City of Lights” at that late hour, we were greeted by the full impact of the neon-glitz of the city.  The Strip was aglow with blinking lights in every imaginable color and it was packed with people.  To these first timers, it was a memorable glimpse of “Sin City.”  Dead-tired after our eight-hour drive, we went directly to our hotel — the MGM Grand.

Vegas is filled with spectacularly showy hotels.
But in the day, the MGM was the Grand Dame of the Strip.
[scanned from brochure]

When one hears the words Las Vegas — which means The Meadows in Spanish — one thinks of two things: gambling and entertainment.  Legalized gambling didn’t happen until 1931, however, and the city wasn’t considered a resort/entertainment destination until after WWII.  The first settlement in Vegas was recorded back in the early 1850s when the Mormon Church sent a mission of 30 men to construct a fort and teach agriculture to the natives in the area.  The city itself was founded in 1905 after the railroad designated Las Vegas as a major division point.  The rest is history.

We spent our first day in Vegas at Old Nevada, a thematic reproduction of a boomtown with recreated buildings, dining facilities, melodrama, gunfights, and hangings.  It was an “Old West” kind of day on the grounds of Bonnie Springs Ranch, which was built in 1843 to serve as a stopping point for wagon trains making their way down the Old Spanish Trail to California.

Yes, our day was very touristy; and yes, we had a ball.

A miniature train runs from the parking lot to the ranch.

No Old West town would be complete without a saloon.

No worries; there are modern facilities too.

Visiting some of the colorful citizens of Old Nevada.
(Red Garter Sue “her position ain’t changed” and
Ben Murphy “town drunk and nobody’s friend.”)

Golden Queen Mine — notify next of kin before entering.

A cool treat on a hot day leads to …

… a weight check on the feed scale.

The main reason for our trip was to see a show or two.  Unfortunately, there were no reasonably-priced revue tickets available for Saturday night.  Instead, we went to a concert — Kenny Rogers Under the Stars at Caesar’s Palace.  Our $12.50 tickets were in the bleachers.  The performance was good, but those uncomfortable seats left an impression we could have done without.

I don’t recollect what we did on our second day in Vegas; there are no photos to help me remember.  After a late night out, we probably took it easy.  Maybe went for a drive; maybe just walked The Strip, which I remember thinking was not nearly as impressive during the day as it was at night.

The Strip at night is very colorful.

But that night we did manage to get tickets to Jubilee — an “adult” show in the Ziegfeld Showroom at the MGM Grand.  I think the show was so rated because there were topless showgirls in the line-up.  Otherwise, I didn’t see anything that was adult-oriented about the show.

Showgirls are synonymous with Las Vegas.
[scanned from brochure pictures]

The Maitre d’ gave us a nice booth for the show.
(the “posed” photo was included in the ticket price.)

OK, I see you’re wanting to know if we gambled at all while we were in Vegas.  We didn’t have any money to throw away, so the short answer is that we stayed away from the tables.  But we did make a miniscule deposit into a “one-armed bandit.”

The coin is made of metal, copper clad, and is a
detailed 2-sided replica of an actual Lincoln penny,
except that it is only 5/16 inches (9 mm) in diameter.

I imagine Vegas put on quite a show for America’s Independence Day, but we didn’t stay to see it.  We had a long drive back home and work the next day.

By the way … did you catch the hot pink clutch bag in the photos.  That’s the one I went to buy before the trip and came back with a brand new car to boot.