Escape From Sin City

Unfortunately, I did not get thrown in jail.

Unfortunately, Las Vegas needs a big detention facility for its serious, accidental, and notorious criminals.

It's the Clark County Detention Center and it's huge.

Apparently O.J. Simpson is there.

But the young man running the security station has a ten year old daughter who is into reading mysteries, so when I told him who I was and why I was trying to get into jail he was all over helping us.

In a sometimes confused, is-this-reality-you're-talking-or-are-you-making-this-up? sort of way.

Poor guy. I do talk about my characters like they're real.

Anyway, I found out some important information, even though it was from outside the holding tank. (Which is as far as a 13 or 14 year old will be allowed to get anyhow.)

(Go ahead, pick a character. Any character.)

(Well, okay, not Hudson. He's 73. I mean any character of appropriate age. You know.)

And then, as luck would have it, across the street from the cagey CCDC--a mere parking lot away--we spotted a wedding chapel.

With a drive through window!

I squealed, I was so excited. Mark and I were with another couple who had flown in to Las Vegas to join us on this adventure. I'll call them Bill and Loraine to protect their identities. (After all, no one would guess that I'd use their real names right? I mean, if I said I was making up names, that's what I'd be doing, right? Right.)

Anyway, Bill and Loraine are fans of the Bellagio (as are many of you apparently!) and Cirque du Soleil shows--you know, the more high end stuff. I warned them that this wasn't going to be a high-end excursion. That we were there to check out bad shows, tacky wedding chapels, forbidden corridors, and the jail.

Loraine couldn't wait.

So when I spotted the wedding chapel, she squealed, too. And then we dragged the men to this drive-through facility and got an awesome tour of the inside of the chapel. You can get married in the little room downstairs. Or a churchy looking big one upstairs. Or on the rooftop! With Astroturf and a little arch bridge. (The photographers blue-screen out the CCDC in the background. for no extra charge.)

And, if you want, Elvis can marry you.

Loraine and I came away from our extensive chapel tour thinking that it was actually a lot nicer than a drive-by facility first seemed.

The boys just wanted to get out of there!

Speaking of Elvis--we ran into a few of those (as you can see from the picture). They all wear that white getup. And, yeah, that little Elvis cracked me up. It would be interesting to know his story.

We saw bad shows, got nosy in back corridors, took tons of pictures, and had the good fortune of asking the right person to show us around behind stage at a club. There were all sorts of rooms, offices, VIP sections, sky boxes, and loading docks that I had no clue existed. From the front the venue looks almost small, but as you probably already know, nothing's small in Vegas.

(Well, except that one Elvis impersonator.)

So it was a very fruitful trip and I'm excited to get Sammy off the plane and into Las Vegas's McCarran Airport (which we also took lots of pictures of). And even though I'm pretty sure I won't be using all the information I gathered, it's better to have too much than not enough. Especially since I'm not a fan of Sin City and have no desire to go back.

Unless maybe it's to the Bellagio.

Still. How could staying at a posh hotel compare to a Sammy Keyes romp through the city?

Watch out Las Vegas, here she comes!