Las Vegas

So during our time in Vegas we experienced more rain in a few days than they had in all of 2009. The sun finally came out towards the end of the week and was full on for our journey home last Sunday. We were staying at a hotel complex about 30 minutes away from the action that had lots of hotel rooms and meeting spaces as well as a casino in the middle. Even though I walked through the casino multiple times a day I never put a single cent in a machine. In fact, the casino seemed pretty depressing to the point that one of my colleagues nicknamed it “the pit of despair”. I had jet lag and one morning while waiting for the workout room to open I paced through the length of the hotel a few times which meant I walked through the casino at 4am more than once. Who’s in the casino at 4am? A lot of people that shouldn’t be. I walked past a lot of senior citizens during the day but at night it looked like people who maybe had come from work. There was a guy with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, dosing off at the slot machine. It was strange to walk through a building that on both ends where the hotel and meeting rooms were located was non-smoking but the pit of despair was not.

We did get to the strip the last night and it was good to see some of my U.S. colleagues and even caught up with my buddy S, a Vegas lover if I ever saw one! I miss them so. A few of my UK colleagues were amazed at how the Americans just melted at the sound of their accents.

As we were leaving one of my colleagues asked me if being in America made me homesick and if travelling back was going to be difficult, but no it wasn’t. As any business traveller knows, when you spend the whole trip in hotel rooms and meeting rooms, you could be anywhere in the world. So nothing of the experience made me go, oh I miss this!

One thing that did strike me as I was standing in line at Starbucks in the hotel one morning was the size of the muffins in the display case. No one really needs to eat a muffin that’s as big as a small planet do they?

Didn’t get much rest on the plane on the way home but watched a really sweet film called Away We Go.

As I was taking the train home from Gatwick Airport, one of my worst travelling nightmares almost became a reality. I called H to tell him I was heading home and as I exited the train at Victoria Station I noticed the other woman that had been in my car had my suitcase instead of her own and was exiting the train. To get her attention I had to sort of yell at her which seemed to really shake her up. When she realized her mistake all she could say was, “Well done”. Maybe it was because I had then been up for over 24 hours but I was annoyed that there wasn’t an apology but instead a well done.