Las Vegas is a hellhole

First off, apologies to my cousin Kevin and his lovely wife. I’m sure there are lots of things to like about Las Vegas, but I just didn’t enjoy myself in the City of Really Expensive Everything. I went to Vegas for a conference, and luckily enough for me the conference kept me quite busy and mostly away from all of the wonderful distractions the strip has to offer the person who has too much money and time on his or her hands.

The time I did have consisted of me overpaying for everything. You want an idea of how expensive that place is? Buy a Coke. It’ll cost you $3.75. For a 20 ounce bottle. You can guess what beer costs.

Secondly, nobody was happy. I walked around several casinos, walked through several of the shopping centers, and down the main strip, and all I saw were people trying to do exactly what I was doing…

…trying to get the hell out of wherever they had found themselves.

You see, the whole strip is set up to keep you in a constant state of confusion. Casino floors are linked together by shopping malls with winding paths and linear hallways. Everything’s ridiculously huge and a week’s time is not nearly enough to get the lay of the land. To go to the “next casino” you need to be willing to put in some serious time. Like two hours.

Oh, and everything’s broken. The monorail was always down, the trams at the airport were broken, and for some reason I had water leaking into my bathroom from above.

If RailsConf is there next year, I’m gonna be pretty upset.