A cronut. I couldn’t think of a better reason driving me to travel to Las Vegas for 48 hours in the middle of the week. I’ve seen the Eiffel Tower in Paris. I’ve even climbed it. I’ve taken the vaporetti (water taxi) in Venice from one island to the next. I’ve even been to the pastry shop that created the cronut, Dominique Ansel, in London and Los Angeles.
I didn’t need to go to Las Vegas.
“I didn’t realize how close Las Vegas is to LA. You want to go?” said my French-Canadian friend Claudine when she arrived in Los Angeles from Indonesia, where she’s been living for 15 years, for a business meeting (the scuba show).
“Ha, believe it or not, I’ve never been to Las Vegas,” I said.
Claudine raised her eyebrows eyes.
“I’m in,” I said, a cronut (or two) the goal.
I never felt compelled to go to Las Vegas. I’d thought of it as a destination to book end a trip around some of the national parks in the USA. But I never thought about it as a weekend vacation on its own from Los Angeles, even though it’s so close.
“I’d rather spend my money to see the Eiffel tower in Paris,” a collaborator said to me years ago.
My collaborator’s comment stuck with me, until I discovered that my favorite French bakery opened a shop in Las Vegas. A close friend living in London introduced me to the cronut invented by Dominique Ansel, a French baker who had made his name in New York City. After the cronut in London, I discovered a Dominique Ansel shop in Los Angeles. I only had about eight months, from summer of 2019 until the lockdowns in March of 2020, to make the trek across the city to the bakery in The Grove, three busses and a walk the last mile, once a month. The Los Angeles bakery closed six months after the Covid lockdowns began.
I must have manifested (as Claudine likes to say) this trip to Las Vegas because I had cronuts on my mind in the days before she arrived (thanks to Instagram). I was so desperate for a cronut, or any other pastry from that shop, that I was about to book my own trip to NYC to make a “tour du Dominique Ansel” there, where he has several shops.
There’s only one cronut flavor each month, and even if you think you’re not going to like it (salted potato chip ganache?), you will.
A draft of a 48-hour plan was hatched just 24 hours after Claudine arrived from Indonesia, Spirit for the flight and the Flamingo Hotel (the first hotel on the Strip, opening in 1947, and the oldest) for the accommodation. We slept on it – maybe I was wishing that sanity would prevail –, then booked our choices just six days before we were to leave (for a little over 200 USD each).
Spirit is a budget airline, the kind where they think up fees for things you didn’t know you needed on a flight. Cheap in other words, if you can manage with a small bag. I figured I could fly any airline, as long as I arrived safely, for a 45-minute flight to Las Vegas. My only request was to book on the websites of the businesses. The booming middleman culture fueled by the internet often leads to disappointment, in my experience, like getting booted from a flight or an absent hotel reservation (it happened once).
So I expected a party bus in the sky to Las Vegas. It wasn’t. I can’t remember a less chaotic boarding. I put my little bag within my bigger bag and slipped it under the seat. I don’t understand Spirit’s business model, how they issue seats and sell them up to the last minute before boarding, but it works.
June gloom obscured any chance of viewing the coastline on take-off. Once the flight circles back from the take-off over the Pacific, you see the San Gabriel Mountains and then desert. You think the desert can’t be all that’s out there. It is, until Las Vegas.
I didn’t believe what we were looking at was Las Vegas when Claudine, sitting by the window, said, “I think that’s the city.”
An isolated city with an airport, like a colony on some faraway planet. That was all I saw.
When I had researched how to reach the city from the airport, one of the options that came up was to walk. It might take an hour to reach our hotel, but walking came up as doable. The man sitting next to me on our flight, on a gambling getaway, told me he was going to walk to his hotel at the south end of the Strip.
“You can walk to the MGM Grand Hotel and then take the monorail to the Flamingo Hotel,” he said.
A representative at the airport talked us out of it.
“No sidewalks to get there,” she said.
She’s wrong (it can be done along Paradise Road), but we bussed it – the 109 bus (north) outside of Terminal 1 for a short ride to a transit station to get on the Deuce, north to the Strip.
We jumped off at Harrah’s but decided the Paris stop would have been better for the Flamingo Hotel. And we began our 48 hours of eating heart attack food at places like White Castle (Claudine got the idea from a movie, Harold and Kumor Go to White Castle), Fat Sal’s which I chose over a place really called the Heart Attack Grill, or Buddy’s Pizza Cake where I fell off the soda wagon with a giant Dr. Pepper over a full cup of ice. My biggest sin in Sin City. Nothing was going to curb some weight gain, not even 20,000 to 30,000 steps per day.
I don’t remember seeing salad on a single menu. Or I didn’t look for it. The most fiber I got in 48 hours was from the tomato and spinach served with an egg with hollandaise sauce, placed in a box carved out of a loaf of bread (one of my bad food choices). Or from a subliminal message from the multiple-stories-high billboards flashing advertisements for cucumbers at Sprouts (which is a bit of a walk from the Strip). At least I saw a vegetable.
I was told I could go big with the restaurants, if I wanted to spend that kind of money. I still spent around 20 USD on my heart attack food meals, although they would come with free refills for a soda, which I didn’t need.
The Flamingo started out as a three-story hotel. The original structure is gone. In its place is a hotel of three 28-story towers, with outdoor pools for humans and some for flamingos, ducks and coi.
The game in Las Vegas became clear when we arrived at our hotel. You want an early check-in? That’s 22 USD. You want a late check-out, another fee. You want to sit on a lounge chair at the pool? That’s another fee. The lure to Las Vegas was immediate: cheap flights and cheap hotels. Maybe warm weather. Then they take your money. And it doesn’t quit until you board your flight home.
We elected to dump our bags at the valet and spend our 22 USD elsewhere, the TIX4U kiosk to book a show. I’d advise doing it on your own, online or at the box office. I suppose one benefit of a third-party seller is the agent might help you decide on the show. Our agent talked us into going to the original Cirque du Soleil show on the strip, Mystère, at Treasure Island. The newest one cost close to 200 USD for the cheapest available seats. Neither of us had seen it, so we were in.
The agent had told us two tickets, one 95 USD the other 80 USD, with one an aisle seat. I didn’t check the amount when I handed over my credit card. The tickets ended up being two for 95, and neither was on the aisle. I got over my irritation, mostly at myself for not checking the amount before tapping my card, because the show was fantastic. No idea what the story is about, but the actors exhibited incredible strength moves for an hour and a half, on the stage and in the air, often in poofy costumes and head pieces I’d have difficulty walking down the street in.
The description of our hotel room (a number so long I was afraid I’d forget it) was two queen size beds with a view of “attractions.” The attractions were the hotel grounds filled with palm trees, the High Roller ferris wheel and the Sphere. When we went to bed, I thought about closing the curtains and then I decided not to – the windows are one-way visibility – and woke up to the Sphere on a backdrop of a deep orange sunrise.
The city is not much more than the Strip (Las Vegas Boulevard), hotels that cover blocks both across land and up into the sky, and neon signs (old and new; it’s a different city at night or you can visit the “dead” ones at the Neon Boneyard). And yet, it’s not intuitive how to navigate the streets and shops. You can’t just cross the streets at the lights. The city has constructed a series of pedestrian overpasses over the roads and directly into some of the malls associated with the hotels. Hotels have their gimmicks. Iconic streets of Italy or the canals of Venice, an early evening sky and stars, a spiral escalator, indoor gardens, elaborate Rome-inspired fountains and high-end fashion shops catering to their hotel guests. It’s disorienting, and sometimes you’re screaming to yourself, “How do I get out of here?” Or maybe, “How do I get in there?”
For the second day, I bought tickets online for us to see a film, Postcard from Earth, in the Sphere. The Sphere is, well, a giant sphere in the middle of the desert – you can see it from your flight –, displaying images from its 57.6 million LEDs 24/7, providing a total AI experience. The show starts before the show starts. Robots in the entry hall answer questions, even silly ones, like where the restrooms are. You’ll get a detailed response, including a discussion of why there is a “W” or an “M” on the door.
There’s more than the visual, some rocking of your seat, but I didn’t feel any mist or wind or smell any smells. The seats really were nosebleed seats. Escalators take several minutes to reach the next level (and you don’t want to look backwards while going up), and when we reached our level, we had to climb some more. Anyone with vertigo might take a pass on the Sphere, or at least the not-so-cheap cheap seats. People grabbed onto us as they passed us to reach their seats, which I decided was part of the experience.
The film was a story about the Earth and how all humans left in spaceships to allow it to heal. Meanwhile, you can’t help but think about the fact that you’re watching the film inside a structure costing 2.3 billion USD and it’s on 24/7.
After the show at the Sphere, Claudine went to relax at the pool while I took a detour towards the Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino, where Elvis had been in residence before he died. The street in front of the hotel is called Elvis Presley Blvd. There, the feeling that Las Vegas is like the land that time forgot, including take-out places I haven’t seen in years (White Castle), overcame me.
I took the monorail (they leave every 8 minutes) back to the hotel where I had a difficult time finding Claudine lounging at the pool. She had commandeered a free spot, a towel and a 26-dollar drink. I didn’t expect to see a crowd when I got there. But the pool, an outdoor daytime discothèque, with a bar in the water, is open to the general public, not just hotel guests, and tourists know it as an entertaining spot to meet/connect with other tourists. Or just to keep cool.
The several lifeguards seemed unnecessary for a pool of adults in waist deep water, until EMTs arrived to revive a man who intoxicated himself to the point of unconciousness. Otherwise, the Flamingo Hotel pool was a people watching spectacle.
In the evening, we got on the Deuce (going north) to visit Fremont Street, the kind of place where children won’t understand why strategically placed words on T-shirts or shorts is funny to adults. The length of Fremont Street is covered by the largest canopy of LED screens in the world, displaying waves of artistic digital designs. At ground level, you find just-short-of-nude women advertising the opportunity to be photographed with you, like the Marvel characters on Hollywood Boulevard. Or if you’re cheap, you can be like an older gentleman I saw filming one of the women with his phone from a distance in a shop.
Then again you might find Pinkbox Donuts or ABC Stores from Hawaii.
The crowd thinned out on the Fremont East side of the street. So did the noise and the flashing lights. It was there though where we saw our first newly married-in-Vegas couples celebrating – where they were getting married, we don’t know – followed around by a hired photographer.
I didn’t go to Las Vegas to gamble. It’s hard not to. The city makes it easy for you. Machines greet you in the gate area as you disembark from your plane. Which means you can lose your money up until the last call for your return flight.
“How do you choose a machine?” Claudine asked.
I looked around.
“Well, if you are into Harry Potter, there’s a machine for that. If you like Wheel of Fortune, there’s another one for that. You like coral reefs? There’s one for that,” I said.
You watch and you no longer wonder why people think more government is a good idea. Provide food and drink and a bunch of flashing lights with buttons to push, and we’re happy to sit like zombies for hours while the machines take our money.
The minimum bet for blackjack tables, that we saw, was 15 USD. Most tables were 25 USD and up. That doesn’t leave much time to play if you limit the amount of money dedicated for gambling on your getaway. Claudine gave herself a budget of about 150 USD the last night.
Her father’s advice? “Keep your money. Find a man to marry.”
It might be easier than winning there. Claudine was already texting me that she was going back to the room before I finished another tour of the lights of Las Vegas after dark.
Less than 48 hours in Las Vegas felt like a week. Flashing lights, music, various aromas 24/7, make you feel like a character trapped in a video game or the internet. The only indication that life slowed down for a few hours overnight was when the Sphere began displaying rotating images of all the phases of the moon, until sunrise when a waking emoji face appears.
By the morning of our departure, just short of 48 hours after our arrival, I still hadn’t gotten my cronut. For an instant, I thought, “Forget about it.”
Nope.
I got up before 7:00, annoying my roommate by rifling through the plastic bags in my luggage, took my shower and ran out by around 7:30 to see if it was early enough to snag a cronut. They sell out! I left through the side door of the hotel, bypassing the casinos to reach the street and the closest pedestrian bridge over to Caesers Palace where the pastry shop is located. I followed Google over to the end of Caesers Palace by the doors of the Forum Shops, which were still closed at that time. I had to walk back and enter through the reception area of Caesars Palace, where I wandered past the casino and to my surprise found my pastry shop not so far from the front door. Five minutes if I had known where I was going.
“A cronut please,” I said, after lingering over the rows of French crafted pastries in the case, as the only customer at 7:45.
The attendant wrapped up my cronut of the month,“tangy lemon curd and creamy olive oil ganache,” in the golden-colored Dominique Ansel box, with a tab on top to carry and specific directions printed on it on how and when to eat the cronut (cut it with a serrated knife). The price, 48 hours in Las Vegas plus 11 USD.
When I got back to the room, so proud of my coup, and unwrapped my cronut, Claudine said, “It’s just a donut!”
My pride took a hit. And another in the next moment, when I discovered another Dominique Ansel location, Dominique Ansel Marchè, was at the Paris Las Vegas, the hotel next door, with a more expansive menu, including pastries, ice cream, sandwiches and well, salads. Foiled by Google maps which didn’t yet register the Marchè.
“There’s always something that brings you back,” my father used to say.
Next time.
Books…
Norwegian Lessons in Indonesia (2023)
An Accidental Artist: Discovering Creativity through Scuba Diving (2018)
Art for sale at AnemoneWatch on Square
Janice Nigro 
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