On arrival at Vancouver Airport we were taken by surprise by a crack team of US Immigration Officers, cunningly positioned on the Canadian side of the border. Caught unawares, they managed to catch us red-handed with two apples we had bought in the supermarket that morning and had planned to smuggle into Las Vegas. However after a close inspection by America's finest, it transpired that the apples were in fact grown in the USA and we were therefore permitted to have our irises scanned and fingerprints taken and enter the Land of the Free.

We stayed at the Stratosphere Hotel, which is the tallest building in Las Vegas. Like most Vegas hotels it also contains a casino, which covers the whole ground floor of the building and is designed to be labyrinth from which guests will find it impossible to escape to the outside world. We therefore got hopelessly lost every time we left our room. Luckily this was not all that often, as we had been upgraded to a suite after Graeme slipped the receptionist $20 at check-in.

At the Vegas casinos, most of the space is taken up by slot machines, where gamblers feed their money into a machine and win or lose at random. The rows of gamblers sat there night and day, with identical dazed looks on their faces like those of B-movie zombies. Many of them had special casino credit cards which plugged directly into the slot machines via a cable from their shirt pockets, givng the impression that the machines were feeding on their life force and not just their bank balances. They say that Vegas is like disneyland for grown-ups, but in fact it is all about instant gratification, the most childish of impulses, and ...ooh look! a pirate ship! Our favourites included the casino with flamingoes in the garden, and the one designed to look like a Parisian market-place – except one with slot machines on every corner. The MGM casino has lions in a glass enclosure, which are apparently descended from the original MGM lion that roars at the beginning of the movies. However our overall favourite was Bellagio's, with its fountains that danced in time to a beautiful song called 'Proud to be an American'.

We also made a pilgrimage to Circus Circus to see the merry-go-round bar from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Unfortunately it was closed for the day, but we persuaded security to let us in for a photograph.

In the evening, we went to see perhaps the cheesiest show in Vegas, a girly vampire musical called 'Bite' which consisted of topless women with fake vampire teeth shaking their implants around to Guns n Roses and Motley Crue. No one else in the audience seemed to find it as funny as us, although the 99 cent margaritas might have helped. The following night we splashed out and got tickets to see the legendary cheesemeister David Copperfield! bite pic More worryingly, another attration popular with inebriated tourists is the Gun Store, where for $20 you can pick out a gun and shoot it at a target of your choice. Debbie chose to shoot Osama bin Laden with a Smith & Wesson. After announcing that she had shot him in the heart, the instructor helpfully informed us that this was not possibe as Osama does not in fact have a heart!


On our last day in Vegas we took a coach trip along route 66 and out to the Grand Canyon. The Canyon was utterly spectacular but also utterly overcrowded with thousands of other tourists. Luckily, this being America, we only had to walk half a mile from the visitor centre to get the view all to ourselves!