Emily

I spent too long here and left without sleeping before my 4:30am flight, exhausted.

I did, however get to do a lot of fun things: we visited the Hoover Dam; we took a night flight in a six-seater plane over the Strip; I swam in the hotel pool and read my Kindle poolside; bought half a pound of candy at the candy store in the lobby on a whim; we went to the Pinball Hall of Fame and blew $12 in quarters; finally got to try In-N-Out Burger; saw a terrible Cirque show (Criss Angel); saw a great Cirque show (Zumanity); watched the Mirage Volcano explode; watched the fountains at the Bellagio play Hoedown from Rodeo, All That Jazz, and the Star Spangled Banner; won $10.62 on the penny slots in our hotel.

A fun trip all in all!

Do yourself a favor: take that $20 that you were going to feed into the slots and put it into the change machine at the Pinball Hall of Fame instead.

This “museum” is full of rows of pinball machines spanning from 1947 to the present.

There are arcade games, too. I won a tiny plastic rat in a 1938 crane machine and a double prize of a plastic ring and a pool-ball keychain in one of those stop-the-light games. (It’s designed to win no matter what, so if you lose, you get one prize, and if you win, you get two!)

You learn all kinds of things about the history of pinball and even America by reading the little handwritten index cards on some of the machines. Did you know that there was a point when pinball was fliperless? And that pinball manufacturers stopped making games during WWII so they could help with making things for the military?

Also, the entire building has the most pleasant smell. Machine oil mixed with popcorn. Heavenly. My couple of hours here were some of the most fun I had in Vegas.

This bookstore has the most books and the least floor space of any store I’ve been to. It’s labyrinthine. Books from floor to ceiling, sometimes in no discernible order. A perfect place to lose hours of your vacation if you’re a bibilophile.

There’s even a cat perched on the checkout counter.