Audio By Carbonatix
My wife had to leave town for the weekend, and instead of sitting around the house saying “No!” over and over again to my nineteen-month-old son Mack, I decided to take him to Vegas.
Since the late Eighties, Las Vegas–once known worldwide as Sin City–has been maneuvering to change its image. The hype says Vegas is now a family town. The nonstop booze riot? The gambling, the hookers, the cornball lounge acts? All a quaint part of history. Vegas today is supposed to be water parks, puppet shows, fake volcanoes and fun, fun, fun for the whole family. A regular Six Flags Over Fremont Street.
I was skeptical. It had been five or six years since my last trip to Vegas, and no place can change that much. This was a town built by depravity. I knew that from personal experience.
So, concerning Sin City’s recent supposed “conversion,” I had some questions: Are these highly touted accommodations for kid-toting visitors enacted in good faith? Is it possible for adults to have fun in Vegas if they bring kids with them? And, most important, will permanent emotional damage be done to my son Mack by putting him in such proximity to Wayne Newton?
In preparation for the trip, I requested a packet of “family fun” literature from the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce. They sent me flyers advertising houseboating on Lake Mead, golf, Grand Canyon tours and a chocolate factory. None of these things struck me as attractions that might appeal to an almost-two-year-old hellion nicknamed “Bongo.”
There was no question in my mind that kids of all ages could have fun in Vegas, because kids can have fun anywhere, except in school and at church. I had fun in Vegas when I was still legally a kid. Too much fun, in fact. TO ENSURE RESPONSIBLE Bongo guardianship round-the-clock during our jaunt, I recruited help. A friend of mine, a fellow working father whom we’ll call “Doug,” agreed to be our nanny. By the time this mob landed at McCarran International Airport, we had already spent a large portion of our almost-unlimited expense account on Huggies, and Mack’s diaper bag looked like the baby-care aisle at Walgreen’s.
We had a complete change of wardrobe, a bottle of liquid Children’s Tylenol, the all-important runny-nose medicine, baby wipes, cookies, crayons, a coloring book, an extra pair of shoes, four bottles of Gerber’s juice, a hat, a pair of baby sunglasses with one lens already missing . . . plus a steno pad, a gray pen from Phoenix Greyhound Park and a tattered paperback copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for emergency reference. Fear and Loathing, a book about the late-Sixties dope culture written by Hunter S. Thompson, has been a bad influence on several generations of writers, journalists and college students. In the book, Thompson and his Samoan attorney visit Las Vegas for several days. They trash rented cars, wreck hotel rooms, drink like fish and take dangerous drugs round-the-clock. It is one of the funniest books ever written.
Thompson likely didn’t intend the work as a guidebook for careening tours of Las Vegas by the beer hippies of America–and I’m one of them–but that’s how it ended up. On past trips I would’ve staggered off the plane and headed straight into a cab. Wild crosstown taxi rides were always part of the Vegas gestalt for me, primarily because you could carry drinks onboard, but also because the parking situation in Vegas has always been a total drag.
But cabs don’t have safety seats for children, do they? For the first time in my life, I rented a car in Las Vegas, a rental equipped with a state-of-the-art car seat for Mack, who like most kiddies absolutely hates car seats for kiddies. I originally thought about requesting a giant white convertible with grossly overinflated tires as a sort of rolling homage to Fear and Loathing. Our ride this trip was a four-door, dark red Chevy. It had power windows.
We piled our junk into the sensible sedan, strapped Mack down and headed for the Strip. Our destination was the Excalibur, the zaniest new hotel in America, located at the far south end of Las Vegas Boulevard.
A THEME PARK WITH KENO girls, the Excalibur is a nutsy medieval money factory. The exterior is made to resemble a castle, with conical towers, stone facing and a large moat. The four huge room wings surround a multistory central building that houses a huge shopping-and-restaurant area, a carnival-game arcade, a jousting ring and, of course, a gigantic casino.
There are men in pantaloons everywhere. One of them took our bags. Another one of them parked our car.
Because of our unlimited expense account–and limited energy for long hikes through hot parking lots while carrying 25 pounds of squirming tax deduction–valet parking was mandatory.
Check-in was a snap, amazing when you consider the time of day (Friday evening) and size of the hotel (four 28-story wings, filled with 4,000 rooms). We hauled Mack up to the room, located at the very end of the eighth floor of one of the wings. By the end of our stay, Mack would begin to whimper every time we started down one of the endless corridors.
Our room was standard Big Hotel, only semicomfortable, but indestructible and baby-proof.
Nanny Doug’s first impulse–you can tell he’s a Vegas veteran–was to search furiously for a room-service drink menu. Shockingly, Excalibur doesn’t have real room service. You can get a continental breakfast delivered to your room, but you’ve got to order it the night before. Otherwise, there’s no possibility for multiple orders of shrimp cocktail, no tubs of iced-down beer and no fried-egg sandwiches at 5 a.m.
The outrageous proportions of the joint–the press kit says it’s the “World’s Largest Resort-Hotel as Certified by the Guinness Book of World Records”–apparently makes room service a logistical impossibility. As Hunter Thompson might say, “God hell!”
THE EXCALIBUR’S FOOD-AND-SHOPPING mall, named the Medieval Village, is made to look like a place where Robin Hood might hang out–except for the escalator and the adjacent 100,000-square-foot casino.
After a quick look-see at Lance-A-Lotta Pasta, the RoundTable Buffet, and the Sherwood Forest Cafe–we decided on the Oktoberfest. All the restaurants had lines. This line was the shortest. This one also formed under the words “beer garden.” Tired and hungry but plenty excited, Mack waited in line almost patiently. Soon we were seated in front of two giant beers and one giant milk.
Mack sat in his highchair for a good twelve minutes, playing with the keno crayons and game cards. In that time, he managed to color in several number squares. I beamed with pride. My son is a player! After we ordered, Nanny Doug slapped a dollar bill onto Mack’s card and started waving for a keno girl.
The Oktoberfest’s floor show was a roaring oom-pah band. Every three minutes, the band enacted a highly entertaining toasting ritual, which required the 350 knuckleheaded beer gardeners to raise their mugs and sing something that sounded like “Broasted! I’m broasted!”
By the time food arrived, Mack was getting sleepy and more than a little punchy. We wolfed down our sausages and asked for the check immediately. Just after 9 p.m., Mr. Vegas fell asleep in his crib overlooking the backside of Excalibur’s pointy towers.
Doug and I discussed briefly an alternating Mack-watch system, by which one of us would stay in the room while the other could bolt downstairs and yank slot-machine handles for a few minutes. Giving in to end-of-the-week fatigue (and the broasting effect of several giant draft beers), we decided instead to watch a pay-movie on TV. CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST ARRIVED at our door, as ordered, at 6:15 a.m. After chow, Mack and I explored the hotel while Doug grabbed my copy of Fear and Loathing and revisited Hunter Thompson’s Las Vegas for the first time in a dozen years.
The castle was much calmer at this hour, so we were able to get a good look at the layout of “the Realm,” as it’s called in ads. In addition to several restaurants, some 23 shops are available for junk collectors in the Medieval Village. The floor above the village houses, MDRVamong other things, a wedding chapel; the floor below is the casino.
While wandering around the gambling area, I sat down for a second to study the odds at the sports book. Mack was crawling around at my feet–we were the only people within 200 feet–when a security guard walked over to inform me that Mack had to leave the gaming area. He was nice about it, so I didn’t feel too bad. Later I learned that Nanny Doug got barked at for playing a slot machine with one arm while holding Mack in the other. Apparently, in Vegas, it’s a felony to hold your child while you’re throwing away his college nest egg.
The Knights of the Round Table theme is carried out in brave fashion throughout the Excalibur. In the casino’s basement is Fantasy Faire, an arcade with medieval-themed games, plus a snack bar, a couple of vibrating theatres and the entrance to the arena where “King Arthur’s Tournament” is staged twice a night. Everywhere you look, authentic-looking suits of armor stand on pedestals. The wallpaper in the guest rooms and hallways (400,000 total yards of it, according to the hotel’s press packet) is printed to simulate stone blocks. When you call the hotel operator, she answers, “Greetings.”
Excalibur is operated by the same outfit that built Circus Circus, and the arcade is a calmer approximation of the manic top-deck arcade at the infamous circus-themed hotel up the street. “Ball” is one of the leading components of Mack’s vocabulary (“Mama,” “Dada,” and “Volvo” are others), so the softball-toss game was a favorite. But we did spend a long time in front of the catapult-the-witch-into-the-cauldron-using-a-sledgehammer game.
THE PREMIER KID ATTRACTION in Vegas, as far as I could tell from my fistful of pamphlets, was a large water park (Wet ‘n’ Wild) on the Strip near the Sahara Hotel. One of our goals was to visit this park with Mack, throw him in, watch him splash.
Traffic was terrible, as it was all weekend. In all my trips to Vegas, taken at all times of the year (including one especially memorable New Year’s Eve), I’ve never seen larger crowds, both on the sidewalks and in the street. After twenty minutes bumper to bumper, we made it as far north as Caesar’s Palace. I checked the rearview mirror at that point and saw a disaster: Mack was sleeping. The life of a parent is built around meals and naps. Meals are a frantic shoveling of food and then unending cleanup. Naps are the only time during daylight when real adult existence occurs.
Even at home, I hate the idea of wasting Mack’s nap time in the car. There was no telling how long Mack would snooze, so we concluded that the water park was out of the question, so we adjusted our course and barreled toward the Liberace Museum.
Located in a shopping center a few miles from the Strip, the Liberace Museum comprises several different storefronts filled with stuff from the late entertainer’s amazing life. With Mack conked on my shoulder, we paid our admission ($6) and started the walking tour. Liberace’s cars and pianos are on display, as well as uncountable photographs made with all kinds of famous people.
The tour went well. Mack quickly shook off the droops and got interested in the museum’s many sparkly garments, musical instruments and vehicles. The tour’s highlight came when we looked back to see Nanny Doug, convulsive with laughter, standing in front of a red, white and blue ensemble Liberace wore onstage during the hot-pants craze. Luckily, Mack didn’t understand.
For comparison-contrast purposes, our next stop was Circus Circus, the original family destination for Vegas-bound broods. Mack and I did a quick standing diaperectomy in the casino men’s room, then headed up to the arcade level to be terrified by the crowd.
A gymnastics exhibition was occurring over our heads. Mack was interested, but only a little. We paused for just a second next to the famed rotating carousel bar, the location of a memorable scene in Fear and Loathing but off-limits to kids. No big deal, Mack’s expression said, let’s get out of this joint. In a flash we were handing a claim check to yet another valet-parking dude. OUR AFTERNOON FLEW PAST. Back at the Excalibur, there was a splendid spaghetti lunch at Lance-A-Lotta Pasta, a quick dip in one of the hotel’s two pools, plus a nap upstairs. “King Arthur’s Tournament” is Excalibur’s version of the Vegas dinner show, featuring live, simulated jousting on horseback, hand-to-hand combat, loud music, scary pyrotechnics, laser lights, plenty of Camelot-style pomp and finger food. Dinner–a teensy chicken, broccoli, a roll–is served without utensils. Except for the broccoli and fireworks, Mack loved it.
But our next agenda item required more car time. The plan was to head out again to see the lights of town, catch a volcano eruption at the Mirage, then tear back to the Excalibur for alternating shifts of cigar smoking and video poker.
After a long wait for our car after the jousting show and even longer crawl through traffic up the Strip, we arrived at the Mirage just as the famed artificial volcano was doing its stuff. Stuck in the valet-parking line in the Mirage driveway, we had a semiterrific view of the volcanic action. We also had a genuinely terrific view of the Mirage’s marquee, a gigantic picture of illusionists Siegfried and Roy, who headline at the showroom and who raise a herd of rare white tigers in an enclosure just off the casino.
Mack appeared unmoved by the volcano, a combination of dancing waters, gas flames and spooky flashing lights. Then again, he’s seen me make a spaghetti dinner. When the smoke lifted, we discovered that every parking space at the Mirage was full, so we retreated to the familiar chaos of the Excalibur. Due to the heat, the crowds, the long corridor walks, plus continuous wrestling with a pre-terrible-two-year-old, we had become discouraged. The drive downtown wouldn’t be worth the effort, we concluded. It never is. Besides, Mack was rubbing his eyes again. By the time we crossed the Excalibur’s moat, Mack was in dreamland, jousting with Siegfried and Roy. Once Mack was in his crib, I took the first shift in the casino.
MACK INSISTS ON EATING first thing in the morning. We used this final meal opportunity to try our third Excalibur restaurant, the RoundTable Buffet. The poop sheet from the hotel’s PR department claims that all of Excalibur’s restaurants combined can serve the most meals per day of any single-building commercial establishment on Earth. (Just an hour after we ate, a winding, Disneyland-style queue of hungry, hung-over, sleep-deprived daddies–many of them holding hands with hungry children–would form at the buffet entrance. Some 1,500 folks can dine at one time in the RoundTable, which on a good day cranks out an incredible 20,000 meals.)
After breakfast, Mack and I headed out for a drive. Encouraged by the availability of valet parking, we stopped in the Mirage for a gawk at the famed indoor jungle and white-tiger enclosure. Both tigers were sound asleep. “Itty,” Mack commented.
Back at the Excalibur, we parked in front of a small stage in the Medieval Village and watched a juggler and a puppet show. This was the new Vegas.
At check-out time, we met up with Nanny Doug and made one last trip down that long, long corridor.
The Excalibur’s marketing muscle is working, that’s for sure. The lobby was jammed with thousands of people. Hustling past the express check-out box, we tossed our key into an envelope and down the slot. The wait at valet parking for our big red Chevy was only 35 minutes. At the airport, Doug checked the bags through while I arranged for Mack’s lunch–a feedbag of trail mix. His mom would be proud. It wasn’t Beer Nuts.
He deserved such royal treatment. The greatest benefit of siring a young lord is early boarding at airports.
NANNY DOUG AND I had proven that it was possible to take a small child to Las Vegas. Possible, but not altogether pleasant. Both of us of were suffering from severe upper-back strain, the result of lugging my first-born back and forth through the casino.
The cost of the trip, in dollars, was not overwhelming. Las Vegas is still a comparative bargain, because food and lodging are reasonable–even at the Excalibur, where our room was $55 a night not counting the crib fee and where current rates are down to the $10 range. Our most extravagant spending had come during inexplicable bouts of souvenir shopping.
At least we didn’t blow all our money at the tables. Mack’s lone keno card was a loser, so it’s not inaccurate to say that he’s gambled away every dollar he ever had.
What they say about Vegas is more or less true. Kids won’t hate it. In fact they’ll probably love it. But my kid won’t be going back for a while.
It’s been several weeks since our trip, and though Mack is showing no outward signs of Wayne Newton poisoning, I’m not going to risk it again.
This was a town built by depravity. I knew that from personal experience.
Wild crosstown taxi rides were always part of the Vegas gestalt for me.
The 350 knuckleheaded beer gardeners sang something that sounded like “Broasted! I’m broasted!”
Mr. Vegas fell asleep in his crib overlooking the backside of Excalibur’s pointy towers.
Naps are the only time during daylight when real adult existence occurs.
It’s not inaccurate to say that Mack has gambled away every dollar he ever had.
