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Mandalay Bay is the latest casino whose text message list I’ve subscribed to.
They don’t make it particularly easy to fill your phone with their crap though. To begin, text "MBTODAY" to 37160. Then you have to confirm by replying with "MYES".
What’s wrong with just a plain "yes" I don’t know.
Fortunately I have a full keyboard on my phone, but I feel sorry for anyone trying to negotiate it using predictive text. You’d get something like "oatodaz" or "navofax" when trying to write the signup message.
But are these moffers worth mfighting with the technology mfor?
Not really. Here are what I’ve had so far – no special promotions, just a bunch of junk mail for stuff that’s already going on.
To compare, the Rio’s text list sent out offers last week for buy-one-get-one-free on drinks, free desserts with your meal, $5 off their buffet and $10 tickets to see the Chippendales.
The latter was available to the first 50 people to respond and for that night’s performance only. Although they could perhaps do themselves a favour by targetting these offers rather than sending out to the entire list, I can still recognise that this would be a great deal for someone who likes looking at naked men.
At the Luxor, playing in a $1/$2 no limit, I have a pair and I’m one of 6 players limping in to the pot.
The flop comes low – 854 – and all different suits. I quite like my overpair so after the big blind bets $5 I raise it to $15. The button calls my raise cold but the original bettor gets out of the way.
The cold call scares me a bit, and the turn card scares me a bit more: it’s a 6. There’s still no flush possible, but if the other guy has a 7 for a straight, I can’t win. If he already made two pair or a set, I’m in bad shape. I don’t see many hands that I’m beating liking this board any more, so I check but I still call a bet of $20.
The river was another 8, so there’s still no flush possible but now even more ways I can lose the pot. I just check and call again, relieved that his bet was only $40 into a pot of more than $80.
"I have an eight", says the villain, before flipping over eight-nine for a flopped top pair with inside straight draw, which became three-of-a-kind on the river.
"Oh you do? Nice hand", I reply. "But I win too".
I table my pocket aces and wait for a floorperson to bring me a shiny new stack of red chips.
At Luxor, when you are holding pocket aces and lose, you still win $100.
Several casinos have "aces cracked" promotions, but one that runs 24/7 and with a substantial consolation prize (relative to the stakes) is pretty unusual.
At Imperial Palace, for example, you can win $100 when pocket aces are beaten and $50 when your pocket kings lose, but this is only on offer between 8am and 11am as an incentive to get their games going earlier in the morning.
While at Excalibur you get to spin a wheel of fortune any time your aces are cracked, but the typical payoff is about $30. Certainly not to be sniffed at, but not enough to change the way you would play the hand in a no-limit game.
This is, in fact, the first time I have ever limped in with AA in a no-limit cash game. And I think I just about got away with it.
If I’d raised pre-flop, I probably wouldn’t have seen much action. That eight-nine offsuit might not have called a raise, and given that nobody else was interested in a fairly unthreatening flop there probably weren’t many other hands that would have paid to stick around either.
My net profit of $23 is quite likely more than I would have made by playing the hand "properly". Which, of course, is results-oriented thinking, but what the heck. I’m sure in theory I make more money by limping here too.
In fact, if I’d been playing a stack shorter that $100, you actually want your pocket aces to lose. The minimum buy-in at Luxor is $40, so if you’re already playing a short stack strategy the value in this promotion is huge. You would have to have an all-in bet called in three spots to win more money when your hand actually holds up!
As I was playing deeper than that (I began the hand with about $250 and the eventual winner had enough to cover me) I fancied a bit of two-way action: slow-play the hand for deception in the hope of winning a bigger pot, but with a $100 safety net if it all went pear shaped.
Back to the table: "Nicely done", says the winner of the pot and we almost high-five across the table. Except because we’re sitting at opposite ends, there’s about six feet of air between our palms. But the thought is there.
$100 for cracked aces is great value for the player. You’re dealt pocket aces one time in every 221 hands, which means that roughly every 22 hands someone at the table will see them. They win about 80% of the time against one other player, which means aces are going to be cracked roughly every 110 hands at any given (full) table.
It’s even more frequent than that when you slow-play and allow more opponents the chance to outdraw you. Which is inevitably what this promotion causes to happen.
As the casino takes $1 from every pot to pay for promotions and pays $100 for cracked aces every 110 hands, it means that pretty much all the money taken is given back just in the aces cracked promo.
But as Luxor also pays an instant high hand jackpot (which is also fairly generous because for aces full of tens or higher counts, as well as any four of a kind or straight flush) right now they’re definitely giving away more to the players than they are collecting from the pot.
Another reason to love the aces cracked promotion is that it actually saved me money on a later hand as well.
I’d raised pre-flop with pocket queens and the player to my left – who I had pegged as a solid player and (from an earlier conversation about not chopping blinds with pairs or suited connectors to try to win a high hand jackpot) someone who knew about all the promotions at Luxor – just called.
Another player made it $40 to go, which I called and then my neighbour moved all-in for $106 more.
It was a fairly easy decision, so after the raiser folded I also threw away the queens and asked whether he wanted his hand to get cracked or actually to win a big pot.
He duly obliged in showing the aces, increasing my smug factor significantly, made some noise like "Bah!" and said "I wanted to have them cracked".
Aces cracked is a funny promotion and it does change the game, particularly when there is a decent prize at stake. There’s just something morbidly appealing about the prospect of winning more money by losing a hand than you could by winning it.
There were three separate rainstorms visible to the South of the valley this afternoon, and even a few drops of water falling in Las Vegas itself.
I only managed to get a quick photo from my compact camera while driving (everywhere we stopped was too low down for a good view) but hopefully you get the idea. It’s damn cool to see this extreme desert weather – from a distance at least!
I have never seen these socks before, or anything like them.
Just in case you can’t make out the detail among all those stripes, it says "Flamingo".
This is a very good sign. Unless they’ve been sitting in a warehouse for nearly ten years, it means that Harrah’s are still producing new sock designs with their casinos’ logos on.
I’m still not 100% sure this is a man’s style (it’s a man’s size, but so were the baby girl pink ones I bought a couple of years ago, which are unsurprisingly still attached to the card they came on) but I didn’t think that was a good enough excuse not to get them.
A steal at $6 (with my Total Rewards Diamond discount) and hopefully the first of many.
Terrible’s casino looks set to be the place where I’ll be putting in most of my video poker action for the next few weeks.
There’s never just one promotion at Terrible’s, there’s usually dozens and understanding exactly what you’re entitled to is part of the fun.
I’ve long been a fan of their "gas days" (currently every day except Thursday and Sunday) when you can claim a $5 Chevron gift card for every 1,000 slot points earned – up to $25 per day.
With the huge gas-guzzling Toyota Rav 4 (which I’m sure is almost double the size of a Rav 4 in Europe) we rented set to make some significant journeys as well as ferrying us around town for the next month, money to spend on fuel is as good as cash in the bank.
What makes this a great promotion is that you don’t have to redeem the points to get the gas cards, you can still use the same points for free slot play or spend them in the restaurants or gift shop.
To get 1,000 points you need to play $1,000 through a machine, which means a theoretical cost of about $5 on Jacks or Better video poker (99.54% payback). The $5 value of the gas card therefore offsets the house edge of the game and the slot club points are all gravy.
The 1,000 points you accumulate are worth between $2.50 and $5, depending on what you spend them on. At the gift shop – the easiest way to burn points on booze, soft drinks, cigarettes, coffee, donuts and sometimes even socks (although sadly none as yet this time around) – it’s 300 points per dollar. You get a better rate at the buffet, or a slightly worse rate if you exchange points for more gift cards or gambling money.
It takes me about half an hour to cycle $1,000 on a 50c video poker machine (the highest denomination they have with the "9/6" pay table that’s needed for this to work) so assuming the 300 points per $1 rate, that’s normally a theoretical hourly rate of about $6.
Certainly not good enough to "go pro" for, but it’s not bad at all for a promotion that takes place five days out of every week. If there’s nowhere else worth playing, there’s usually Terrible’s.
So you can probably imagine how excited I was when I read that Tuesdays and Thursdays were 5x points days – including (unusually) video poker as well as slots.
I really didn’t expect the best video poker games to be included in the promotion, but I could only find signs indicating one particular game that was excluded, and that one wasn’t even as good as the one I’d been playing (Double Bonus, at 99.1% payback).
A couple of spins on the Jacks or Better game confirmed that they were indeed multiplying my points by five, so I made myself comfortable.
The point multiplier doesn’t award the gas cards any quicker (only "base points" count towards that) but the value it adds to the game is phenomenal. It turns the 0.33% of money back from the slot club into 1.66% back.
Whenever you can get a full 1% back in any form – cash back, free play or comps – it’s worth taking notice of.
Looking at it another way, for the first $5,000 you play the gas card still offsets the house edge but you also earn a whopping 25,000 points on top. That’s worth $83.33 at the gift shop or $62.50 in gift cards or free slot play.
Pretty good for about two and a half hours work – it’s a rate of about $33/hr.
Beyond $5,000 played, it’s still a great deal (which means it’s also a great deal on Thursdays too, when it’s not a gas day, but you can still get 5x points and probably a free pack of beer or something too). The point multiplier alone turns the 99.5% game into a 101% game.
Sure, it’s still a bit of a grind and I’m not going to come home from Las Vegas a millionaire because of it, but it’s an enjoyable way to earn food and beer.
And besides, if I spent every day chasing Megabucks for 5 weeks, I think the chances of going broke before the end of the trip would be pretty high…
I still can’t get over just how recklessly Harrah’s have been giving away free hotel rooms, but I’m not complaining.
As our reservation at the Rio was booked in Claire’s name and she’s literally only gambled about $20 on her players card since she had it, there was no offer an awesome Strip view to go with our free room this time.
It’s still a suite – all the rooms at the Rio are – but we’re looking down onto Flamingo Road. It isn’t so bad though, it’s a great view of Palms and Gold Coast.
Although we have this room until Thursday when we can get the keys to our rented house, we also had to check in to two more hotels today – just for the extra free goodies we’d get for accepting their offer.
Gold Coast is right next door so we didn’t even need to drive over there to check in and get the free stuff. They’d offered Claire $20 per day dining credit and $10 per day free slot play if she stayed two nights for free.
The room was newly remodelled and quite nice.
This is the first hotel for quite a while where I’ve been hit by the dreaded "resort fee" stealth tax. It’s only $3 per night – just about the lowest one I’ve heard of and a far cry from the $20+ per night at Station Casinos properties – but the list of amenities that the fee is said to cover is ridiculous.
Apparently this is what it pays for:
– Parking (which is free for anyone, including non-hotel guests)
– Shuttle buses to the Strip and The Orleans (which are free for anyone)
– Local phone calls (which are free)
– Toll free phone calls (I think they are missing the point)
– Incoming and outgoing fax service (I didn’t try it, but I just know there’ll be a charge per page)
– Coffee maker in your room (which would be a feature of the room, not the resort, surely?)
– Access to the fitness center
I checked to see whether there was an additional charge if you actually used the fitness center and there is not, so at least there is one genuine resort feature included. Basically this dumb fee works out to be nothing more than a compulsory gym membership to eek out a few extra quid from guests – even those who have been invited to stay for free.
After taking a few bottles of shampoo and messing up the beds so it wasn’t obvious we hadn’t stayed there, we moved on to the next target.
We actually decided to spend the night at Harrah’s Laughlin, who gave me $85 in cash for showing up as promised. We only managed to use $30 out of our $50 of food credit there for dinner though. The Mexican restaurant closed at 9pm and we just missed it, so it had to be the cafe and I thought ordering myself a second pizza when I couldn’t even finish the first one would be a little unnecessary.
We were delayed getting there a little by the closure of Hwy 95, which was apparently shut for 6 hours after a truck did a somersault in one of the storms we’d been seen looming around the edges of the valley during the day (although they didn’t hit Las Vegas itself).
The desert skies were fairly clear by the time we set out but there were some monster puddles on the ground and the temperature dropped from the hundreds to a modest 80F along the highway. The radio kept being interrupted by end-of-the-world emergency broadcast alerts saying very little of specific use but constantly advising not to attempt to drive through water on the road.
"Turn around, don’t drown", said the daunting message, repeatedly.
A single overhead notice sign warned "US-95 closed at Searchlight" but that was all. It didn’t say why, how long for, or how to avoid it. I didn’t really know what else to do, and wasn’t even sure if there was a sensible detour (I was driving a 4×4, but I didn’t actually want to use all four wheels) so we carried on in that direction.
As we approached Searchlight, there were dozens of trucks all parked on the shoulder and traffic started to slow down.
Amazingly our timing had been just about perfect. Just ahead, trucks started to pull back onto the road – they’d obviously heard something – and we crawled along until we passed a solitary highway patrol car with one officer beckoning traffic through.
Thankfully the route to Laughlin is usually plain sailing all the way. We have to return on Thursday morning to check out of the hotel room that we’re no longer using!
Here’s a picture of today’s bonus value from The Palms.
The reason I’ve included my players card in the haul is that they reissued it at the "MVP" level when there’s absolutely no reason that it should be. All my play there recently has been on Claire’s card, and we weren’t even sure that she would have qualified for a green card with the recent rule changes.
But as we had a linked account and Claire was asking for an updated card, I handed mine over at the same time and got one the same colour but still with my own number on it. Whether or not it will work for half price buffets I don’t yet know – the register may flag me up as an imposter – but it’s definitely good enough to make me look like a VIP so I can carry on jumping various queues.
The other stuff was from a swipe-and-win promotion, and as there’s some kind of giveaway every day this month (and most likely next month too) this is just the first of many yet to come.
Today’s promotion is something to do with cars (I didn’t really pay that much attention) and I won a $10 gas card and Claire got the green stick thing in the photo, which is actually an air freshener that clips into an air vent.
Of course it’s tat, but at least it’s Palms-branded tat, not like those horrible clocks they were giving away in April.
In other tat news, I got this awful string of plastic beads from Binion’s.
The whole of Downtown Las Vegas has adopted a Summer of ’69 theme with tie-die shirts, peace symbols and lava lamps all over the place. It’s pretty cool that all the casinos are taking part in the same theming in their own way.
I didn’t have to do anything in particular to get this piece of garbage, I just asked for a new slot card. However, I think that giving me something shiny was really just misdirection while the players club took a sneaky scan of my driving license.
It was a swift move, as I could only tell as I’d already positioned myself to look down over their screen, knowing that I’m sometimes awkward to find when my British ID shows a date of birth with the numbers the wrong way round to an American, and when I’m actually listed under a California address anyway.
After I pointed out the right record and the lady handed me a set of beads, I saw my mugshot flash on screen before she gave me my license back.
If the Palms hadn’t also taken a scan earlier I would have asked what the hell is going on, but it looks like this is becoming common practice – I think so that rather than having to produce ID every time you speak to them they can just pull up your picture and make sure it’s really you.
However, at the Palms they actually asked if they could take a copy. I don’t know why Binion’s were so deceptive about it.
(Technically it was Day 2 when we started out at 3am after a few hours sleep in a Travelodge next to the airport… but with absolutely nothing to report from the night before and with a full Day 2 ahead in Vegas, this is as good a place to start as any).
Once you leave behind the last traces of Californian civilisation, the drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas is pretty much just a long, straight line.
In 141 miles, take the exit.
Since getting back and looking through some of my older photos of Las Vegas, I’ve decided that in the summer I’ll make it a bit of a project to try to retake some of the old shots I have from exactly the same angle to show how much the Vegas landscape has changed in, really, quite a short time.
It’s more by luck that judgement that I found some that already line up pretty closely, although as there’s only a handful of viewing holes at the top of the fake Eiffel Tower it’s only to be expected that I’d have caputed virtually the same views I did the last time I went up – in June 2000.
So, here I present some wonderful two-frame, nine-year time lapse photography. You can click on the 2009 photos to see all the gory detail, if you’re that way inclined.
Looking kind of southeastish in 2000:
The Aladdin (right, foreground) was almost complete (it opened in August 2000). You can just see the green MGM Grand behind it, and the Tropicana behind that.
And now:
The facelift when it was renamed to Planet Hollywood in 2007 was not so drastic on the hotel tower as it was at ground level. It’s just a little less Arabian. Click to zoom in for the full gory detail, and you can see the The big shiny building springing up in the hole to the left of the frame is the Planet Hollywood Towers by Westgate. The exterior glass was completed just this month.
To the left of the MGM is the top of the Marriott Grand Chateau, which was meant to be cross-shaped but they’ve given up half way through and now it’s just an "L". The property one block east of The Aladdin that looks like it had a Strip view in 2000 – and now has a view of the back of the PH Towers – is The Carriage House. You can just see it peeking through in 2009. An off-strip, non-gaming resort way back then? Clearly it was ahead of its time.
Let’s turn to face due south. In 2000, it looked like this:
Now watch, as the Monte Carlo and most of New York New York disappears before your very eyes, without the aid of an implosion:
That’s all CityCenter. It’s very large and very new (bits of it might open later this year) but it’s not the only thing that’s changed here.
There’s no way you’d see it (or, rather, notice the lack of it) with the poor resolution of the old photo, but if you look way off into the distance now, you can just make out a dark building at the very end of the Strip which is the M resort (opened last month) and a gold building which is South Point (opened 2005).
THEhotel at Mandalay Bay (2003) is also mostly obscured from this angle, but you can just see it behind a NYNY skyscraper.
Then there’s the proliferation of building wraps and other jumbo-sized advertisements all over the place. To be honest, in this view it’s not so bad as if you look at the front of the Flamingo, or fake Venice. But they’re there, and they never used to be.
You can barely see the Strip-facing side of the Luxor from this angle, but it’s been ruined by adverts on the front for some time now. I remember it promoting the musical Hairspray, and currently it’s for Criss Angel. Pimping their own shows is bad enough, but when it’s totally sold out as a billboard for liquor it’s just ghastly.
But not content with spoiling the front of the pyramid, they’ve now slapped a "viewfinder" onto the other three sides (visible in close-up above) to solicit interest in further defacing one of the most iconic Las Vegas landmarks.
There’s a banner for Lance Burton’s show at Monte Carlo hanging on the side of the showcase cinema. That wasn’t there nine years ago. Burton was. You can also see the Hawaiian Market place here, which is new but you can’t really tell from this height. It has a bit of a canopy that wasn’t there before.
There’s also the advert for Dick’s Last Resort in the Excalibur tower, where Merlin once stood.
You can also make out a full-height banner on Planet Hollywood for Peep Show, their new titty show with Scary Spice. Really.
I’m sure the only reason CityCenter doesn’t have any wraps on its big glass buildings (perfect for this kind of abuse) is that all the windows aren’t in yet.
Let’s rotate around to see Caesars Palace in 2000:
For as long as I’ve been visiting Las Vegas, it’s always seemed like there’s been some kind of construction going on at Caesars. I’d never realised just how much it had grown though until I put these pictures next to each other.
The Augustus Tower (front of frame) dwarfs most of the resort from this angle. The Octavius Tower (to the left, with the crane) is almost finished – on the outside at least, which is as far as they’re taking it for the time being. The other major addition is the Colosseum (round building, looks like… err.. The Colosseum), built for Celine Dion in 2003.
These photos crop it off, but they’ve also begun using all the space up to the sidewalk – most recently for a copy of New York’s Serendipity 3, right on the corner of the intersection.
The classic marquee sign (bottom right, squint a bit) has been replaced (in fact, it looks like it actually moved too) with a fancy new one that has a video screen at the top showing clips of Bette Midler and Cher. It’s not as good, but then I love the old-style letterboard signs.
"Starring Gladys Knight", in case you can’t quite make it out. That screen that says "IP" on the side of Imperial Palace no longer works either, I think for quite some time. I never even realised there was one there before I looked at these old photos.
I’m slightly disappointed that I haven’t found any older photos facing north, which is where the skyline has seen its most significant change. Off the top of my head: Desert Inn, Stardust and New Frontier have gone; Wynn, Encore, Palazzo and Trump have opened; FontaineBleau is going up; Turnberry Place and about a dozen other condo projects with just immemorable names that I can never remember which is which have shot up. I’m sure that’s not all.
All you used to be able to see in that direction was the mighty Stratosphere Tower. Now it doesn’t look much taller than any of the high rise condos from a distance.
Speed: The Ride at Sahara is an attraction that’s been there as long as I can remember, but it’s something that I’ve never quite got around to doing. It’s the kind of thing that always gets pushed to the bottom of the list when it involves driving somewhere you wouldn’t otherwise be going for something that lasts less than a minute.
I thought I’d missed my chance when the ride suddenly closed last summer. They said it was closed "for the season", but who knew what season that was? Then a few weeks ago it suddenly re-opened again, alongside a promotion for a new food item.
Eat a Burrito, get tickets for the ride. But not just any burrito. Some adverts called it the "Bomb", others the "B3" (Big Badass Burrito). What’s in a name? A two-foot long, six pound hunk of meat and cheese by any other name is still at least five pounds too many.
To get the freebie, you have to eat it alone – in one sitting – and ride the coaster the same day. No thanks. I decided to do it the sucker way and just paid $10 for the ride.
So, what was Speed The Ride like? I wish I knew, because I wasn’t allowed to wear my glasses on the ride and I feel like I totally missed it.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that this is the first time that’s ever happened. I’m also not exaggerating when I say I might as well have not been there. I don’t know what makes this ride so special, but if I’d known this I wouldn’t have wasted $10 on it.
If you don’t wear glasses, or you’re only mildly short-sighted, you’ll probably think I’m over-reacting. "What are you going to see at that speed anyway?", right? It’s not about the scenery. Believe me, it makes a massive difference to the sensation of movement if you can’t even see the track in front of you.
I have a -5.5 prescription. It’s not that severe compared to some, but I’m still completely hopeless without them. For years I absolutely hated swimming until it dawned on me to get some prescription goggles. I couldn’t believe I’d never thought of it before.
I used to struggle getting from the changing rooms to the pool, and if I’d had to put my glasses in a locker on the other side of the platform then walk to the coaster I’d have struggled too. But really, this would have been the best option. Actually, goggles would have been a better option – they may have let me wear those.
Claire has a -1.0 prescription and she said the ride was great. I don’t know where the line is between "a bit blurry" and "can’t see a damn thing", but I’m definitely on the wrong side of it.
They may as well have blindfolded me, put me in a box, turned on a fan and shaken it about a bit. It would have been just as exciting.
To make matters worse, they didn’t drop this bombshell until I was right inside the car. You’d think the bored attendant might have thought to mention it while we were waiting to get on (there was no line, we were just hanging about for it to fill up) but he waited until I started to sit down before making a "glasses" gesture at me. You know, fingers at the side of his head, moving back and forth.
"They’ll be fine", I said.
"No, you have to take them off", he told me.
"Really?". He nodded. "So where can I put them?".
There were no pigeon holes by the ride itself. Just the coin-operated lockers that were back on the other side of the platform, and the barriers to the ride had already closed.
"Just put them in your pocket", was the genius solution.
What the fuck? Does he mean my shirt pocket that can’t be closed, the back pocket I’m sitting on, or the one in my shorts that’s going to get crushed up against the inside of the car when I get flung in as-yet unknown directions?
Before I could explain to him exactly what was wrong with this master plan, the "driver" (if you consider counting backwards from 5 and pressing a button to be driving) in the control room turned on her microphone and came up with a better idea. "It’s only 45 seconds", she said, "just hold them in your hand". Fantastic. You think I’m a pussy and now everyone else on the ride does too.
The safest place, obviously, was to stick them on my face – from where, in the two years that I’ve had this pair, they’ve never fallen off. In the nearly-30 years I’ve been wearing glasses, I can’t remember a single pair that did.
Watch: I’m actually shaking my head now in every direction I can think of, facing the floor, trying to get them to come loose. It doesn’t happen. What exactly is going to make them fly off when my head is pinned back against a seat at 3.5 Gs?
But as I didn’t have much of a choice, besides giving up and getting off, I rode with my glasses clenched between my fingers, gripping so tightly for fear of losing them that I bent the nose pads and had to bodge my own fitting before leaving the Sahara.
If you think risking losing your sight on holiday is exciting, hand-holding your glasses on Speed is probably the ultimate thrill ride.
This one’s better though. It’s the Desperado at Buffalo Bill’s casino in Primm, about 40 miles from Las Vegas.
At one time (1996) it was the world’s tallest, fastest, longest and steepest rollercoaster. Others have overtaken it every category, but it’s still a monster, reaching 95 mph after a 225 ft drop.
I love Blackpool Pleasure Beach but I’ve never dared ride the Big One. It’s not the coaster, it’s the height of that first climb. The Desperado is actually a little taller (Blackpool held the world’s whateverest records for a year or so) but in the context of not much more than miles and miles of desert – rather than dozens of other, smaller rides – it just doesn’t look so daunting.
I’m also sure that when you look down and see nothing but dust and one oversized barn of a hotel, you won’t feel so high as if you look down and see a large amusement park and rows upon rows of shitty little 6-room bed-and-breakfasts.
Anyway, I rode this beast – taller, faster and more Gs than Speed – last week, with my glasses on. They were fine, of course, and nobody even thought to ask me if they were likely to fall.
I completed my coaster trilogy here:
The Manhattan Express at New York-New York (or, "New-York New-York", as I noticed it was bizarrely hyphenated on the front of the airport’s NYNY gift shop) is not quite so impressive on paper – a mere 200 feet high and 67 mph top speed. I’m sure they must have secured some made-up record for the world’s most twistiest coaster around a replica statue, or something.
It still feels pretty quick though and it throws you around lots. The price is a whopping $14 per ride, but mild concussion is included for no extra cost.
Head well and truly rattled…. glasses still firmly stuck to face.
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