musings

The whole road was American bad taste at its worst. What kind of person would come here for a holiday, let alone get married in one of the sordid little huts? Must be the sickest people in the world. We had had nothing to eat all day and the 100° temperature was making us all feel faint. It was almost too much effort to walk. We flopped into the car and headed back to the KOA. We had intended to use our free meal vouchers later on but the big yellow McDonald’s M was temptation enough for us to stop. The giant iced Coke and air-conditioning made up for the junk-food we were eating.

Back at the camp, we plunged into the cool murky water of the swimming pool; gloriously refreshing. Took a long shower and then we changed into semi respectable clothes in preparation for evening’s exploration of downtown Vegas. By the time we got to the road called “the Strip” the sun had gone down but the temperature was still in the 80’s. We parked in the Greyhound station and stepped out into an unbelievable world of mobile light hoardings incessantly repeating their cycles - waves of light spreading over the hundred foot signs only to vanish and start again.

Mr Sy’s where we had all the vouchers for, had no such signs. It was a small place, but there was plenty of noise coming from it. There were hundreds of slot machines around the walls, and circles of them on the floor. Inside the circles, change girls paced round on raised platforms, and every time there was a big win, they would announce it by microphone. Loud bells also rang out whenever a machine paid out, girls wandered round with radio microphones and called for technicians whenever they spotted a broken machine, and in addition to all this cacophony, a PA system was blaring out the local radio station.

Old ladies were sitting on stools feeding coins into the machines, shrieking with delight when nickels clattered out and the bells started to ring. We exchanged our $10 vouchers for 10 x $1 discs which can only be played in special machines which took $2 per play. Needless to say not one of us won. We gave our free dinner vouchers in, which were exchanged for numbered coupons. Every 10 minutes or so a girl would call out the next five coupons to be seated at a small cafe bar. We would have a two-hour wait, she said. Clever way of keeping you in the place. We all got our photographs taken at a free booth-20 minute wait, she said.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 24th, 1976 at 12:21 pm and is filed under travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.