I’ve been to Las Vegas three times now. The first time, A and I were on the way from Disneyland to the Grand Canyon; the second time, we invited the families, and got married by an Elvis. We love Vegas, crazy Vegas with its dry heat, its non-stop neon lights, and its trance-inducing slot machine noise. I went there for the third time this week, this time not with my wife, but with Tel, my oldest mate from Burnt Oak, who was in America on a visit.

We stayed at the Super 8 Motel on Koval, not far from Paris and Bally’s – not a first choice, of course, but there was a convention or two in town, so it was the best we could afford. It wasn’t bad, a good location, decent rooms, an okay pool – and the sort of place where, over breakfast, you could see a decent fight between a tall black hooker, a small Hispanic pimp and two rejected guests from Jerry Springer. Well, you’d see it if you weren’t in bed with a terrible hangover from a crazy karaoke night at the Ellis Island casino pub right next door, like I was.

The funny thing about going out in Vegas is that drinks can vary wildly in prices. In the casino, of course, they are free, as long as you are filling the slots, and give the waitress a good tip (such as, “put some clothes on, you’ll freeze to death in that”). In lounges and clubs, though, expect to feel like a pushover parent in a toyshop. In those bars which purport to be brewpubs, however, you can have many a beer at roughly a couple of dollars each. We went to a few of them. People even bought us drinks, even after I’d done a nasal cockney spoken-word version of Lola to an audience of local rednecks in cowboy hats.

We went Downtown, to Old Vegas, where we had an average buffet, met a fat old Elvis, watched the Fremont Street Experience and saw the casino used in Back to the Future 2 as ‘Biff’s’ (“We can do this the easy way or the hard way – thud! – the easy way…”). It’s a lot more red and gold carpeting downtown, a lot more CSI and Fredo Corleone. The cool swinging hipsters that we are, we took the bus there and back, meeting Texans and Iowans and other merrymaking mid-Staters on the way. I sensibly kept my Bush-whacking comments to myself. That’s Vegas for you, it has many faces, many accents, many opinions. And so we flew back from the dusty Nevada desert to the wetlands of Sacramento, with Tel deciding that though he kinda liked it, he preferred little Davis better. Me, I still love Vegas, and next time, I’m going back with my wife, my good luck charm (as Elvis would say). Without her, the third time wasn’t lucky, but may the fourth be with us!