Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Now you've done it...

So there I am, late at night by the window in our Vegas motel... laptop glowing, searching the internet in vain for an exciting family outing in the Vegas area that does not involve gambling, hookers, drugs, the mafia, Liberace, hamburgers or humvees... I was getting kind of desperate.

"Okay.." I thinks to myself, "its a big town, theres bound to be lots of things that normal people here do..." Apparently normal people in Vegas if they don like gambling, hookers, drugs, the mafia, Liberace, hamburgers or humvees, they ah... they must play golf? There's more golf courses here in the waterless desert than there are social services I'd wager. BUT, finally, at last, like a bolt from the blue came the answer.

One word. One quarter. Two flippers. Hours of entertainment...

PINBALL!!!

Las Vegas hosts the International Pinball Hall of Fame... not so much a tribute to those who can play well - but to those who LOVE to play. In an out of the way location, miles off the strip, in a plain shopfront with no great fanfare lies the greatest indoor fun I've yet had in the states... row after row of pinball history... from baseball simulators that ran on magnets from the 40's to childrens amusements of the 50's to fantastic and innovative pinballs of the 60's and 70's to (what I consider to be the pinnacle of Pinball Games) the best selling pinball machine of all time The Addams Family and beyond, right up to new machines like CSI and Batman. EVERYONE in the family had a fantastic (and cheap - even better!) time. Jammy played her first pinball, Mario World - how awesome is that! The best of both worlds Mario AND pinball!!! Lucy played her first game - too! We spent a few hours here just soaking up the fun, quarter by quarter...

Theres some fine machines out there - I have no doubt now that in my family room of the future there's going to be a pinball machine - an Addams Family if I can get one. I say to you now, the unconverted, those who have not played pinball in years, or worse, their life - GO - find a machine, play it, enjoy it! Its simple, its honest, its fun and has a certain magic that even at ages 3 and 6 my little girls could relate to.

It was great to leave an attraction in Vegas, not because we'd run out of money - but because we'd had enough fun - it was the highligh of our stay in town, I could have gone back happily for a few more hours the next day but it wouldn't have made it any better... it was just perfect. If you're in Vegas you must visit. If you're not in Vegas you must visit Vegas so you can take this in.


To finish our stay in Vegas off we decided to spend an evening off the strip and get OLD SKOOL.. we headed downtown, were Vegas used to live (and technically still does as the strip is outside the actual boundaries of the city of Las Vegas).

The casinos here are older, dinosaurs, lovable dinosaurs compared to the sleek gambling mega-complexes of the strip, but endearing in a way an old safe cracker is as opposed to a white collar fraudster... still, endearing only gets you so far - the place was dying - so a few years ago they closed the main street and put a huge canopy over it making a mall, not just any mall though -that canopy overhead they turned into the worlds largest damn video screen - and whoo boy - what I thought was a gimmick was actually pretty cool to see in action... its about 200m long, 30 or 40 wide and every hour they present amazing footage overhead. The video we saw for Don McLeans American Pie was by far the most interesting take on the song I've ever seen put together, from casting Altamont as the 'day the music died' with Mick Jagger as the devil, to Janis Joplin as the girl who sang the blues, with Bobby and John Kenndy and Martin Luther King as "the three men I admire the most - the father son and holy ghost" ... the rest you'll have to see for yourself if you get over here.

The next morning we packed up, said goodbye to Vegas and headed off for the west coast. The real west coast, the ocean. We were headed to the OC, Orange County... centre of all things consumerist and I was prepared for the worst...