We had a room on the Fabulous Las Vegas Strip for a few nights, including New Year’s Eve. There was a free dinner on the Eve, and it was lovely steak and lobster, either one of which would have been a good entrée by itself.

The first course was a strange salad that looked better than it tasted. The featured item was some kind of wrap enclosing solid stuff that was less substantial than just cream cheese mixed with vegetables and more substantial than a mousse. I think it might have had cooked yellow squash chunks in it, but hard to say – it basically had no flavor. There was diced up artichoke hearts and tomatoes on the top of it, and that was good, but I never developed a taste for the wrap thing so didn’t eat more than a little bite. There isn’t much I don’t eat, and usually find some element to be fascinated by – texture or whatever, so this was a notable event.

The dessert was a very dark chocolate layer cake with a big curl of milk chocolate with ‘Happy New Year’ printed on it, plus a piece of white chocolate with ‘2009’ written on it in chocolate. And next to the cake on the plate was a little shot glass with some mocha-flavored sludge under whipped cream. It was all very good, except I always wonder what white chocolate is, exactly, and I don’t know what the purpose of the shot glass dessert was unless maybe the people who couldn’t face digging into a giant piece of cake could poke around at this little glass. It seemed like a spoon didn’t fit down into it very well, but I wasn’t so hungry that I thought about digging down there with the end of a knife for more than a moment.

Last year at this dinner there were fortune tellers and one of them told me I am a great communicator – should take up writing or painting because I had a lot to express. I was looking forward to seeing if there was a change, but no fortune tellers this year, probably to save money. I decided we might not want to know what is coming in the next 12 months.

391,000 people were expected to visit Las Vegas for New Year’s Eve this year, 20,000 would be downtown and the rest on the Strip. I suppose these statistics come from room reservations, and they said this was 7,000 more than last year. But the room rates were lower than years past – a mere $200 a night or so in some cases – so the hotels weren’t bringing in the dough like they would wish. The economy here is really bad, a big surprise to everyone who thought no matter what people would come here to escape their money problems for a few days and gladly spend like there was no tomorrow.

We were staying on the 22nd floor at the Excalibur facing north so we had a view of the strip. On the big night the streets were closed and that intersection there in front of the Statue of Liberty filled up with people. Here is how it usually looks. The roller coaster is at the New York-New York casino.


Here are the police cars blockading the street coming from the Interstate on New Year’s Eve. It is very strange to see the streets closed like that, and people walking from the other side of the Interstate to get to the Strip – I felt like I was seeing the aftermath of some major disaster.



Here are the people in the intersection. You can see the speckledness of them and the absence of car lights. The walkways over the street (those gold lights you see marching across) are all closed off, and you can see some police vehicles parked below the near one. We opened our window and could hear all those people yelling and counting down the seconds. It was a mighty roar.



This was our view of the fireworks.



The show was a disappointment to everyone this year because after one of the hotels caught fire last year from welding sparks the fire department wouldn’t let them shoot them off from the tops of buildings, they had to use the tops of parking garages and the ground. Before the event the authorities tried to spin it as more intimate, but bottom line was most of the people standing outside on the Strip (to see the fireworks) couldn’t see much at all. And they are all going to complain about it for the rest of the year.


There were also some side shows this year that I don't have pictures of:
"Australian daredevil Robbie Maddison thrilled the early crowd at the Paris Las Vegas tonight when he jumped his motorcycle onto the top of the Arc de Triomphe replica, then dropped from there onto a landing ramp. The monument stands 97 feet high."

Mr. Troutbend saw this on closed-circuit TV but it wasn't shown on any of the local news broadcasts.

"Robbie Knievel successfully made a daredevil motorcycle jump in front of the volcano at The Mirage in a stunt for Fox TV. Previous reports said he would be jumping over the volcano."

What a fraud. We were told he was jumping right over the top of the new more-fire version of the volcano at midnight and the announcer kept stringing us along and building up how dangerous it was, and yet when it happened, it looked like he didn't jump over it, but they never admitted it so we weren't sure. We had to come home and read the newspaper to get the true story - it was at 9:20 pm, not even the midnight they kept going on about. Lying media bastards. I don't know which network it was, might have been Fox.