Diary of a Blackjack Player
1
"Sera nimis vita est crastina, vive hodie....!"
Tiffany, the Senior Stewardess in charge of Economy class, quietly whispers into my ear. "Excuse me Sir, but we are due to land soon. Please fasten your seatbelt." Slowly, I lift my head and gaze around at my fellow passengers. On my left are a middle-aged couple from the Mid-West, judging from their accent, possibly from Colorado or Idaho. They both seem wrapped up in their own little world, avidly discussing their holiday (or ‘vacation’) plans for the forthcoming next few days. Sat alongside my right side, occupying the next three adjacent seats in the centre aisle, are my travelling companions for this trip; Steve, a colleague from my current daytime employment as a Computer Consultant in the South of England, and Dave and Jane, smalltime gamblers that I had met a few years before, during my innocent, initial few months of playing the tables for fun.
I start to think back to my last visit to this monstrosity in the desert: Las Vegas, the gambling and entertainment Mecca of the World. Well, this time things would be different! No longer one of the millions of harmless tourists that flock here every year, this time I was here to actually play the odds and win.
For the benefit of anybody reading this who hasn’t taken a trip to Las Vegas, it might be worth me summarising the main games offered here....Nah, if you haven’t been, then hard cheese, as the rest of this book will make no sense to you either!
The ‘plane starts to bank sharply to the right. Even though it appears from the window that Vegas is slap bang in the middle of a flat moonlike desert, in fact it is surrounded by three main mountain ranges, which means that, for air travel at any rate, it takes almost an hour to bank one way and then the other to negotiate a safe passage straight down to the boiling, late-summer heat, of the tarmac at Las Vegas’ McCarran Inernational Airport, located just 2km south of the world-famous ‘Strip’.
During the descent, the main strip hotels glint in the sun. If you land here during early evening, the mass of neon blazing away amidst a featureless landscape is a unique experience. Luckily for the million or so Las Vegan residents, all the electricity nowadays is powered from the Hoover Dam, 200 or so miles due East from here. In the distance, you can make out the high-rise resorts Downtown, renamed ‘Glitter Gulch’ in the fifties, due to the amount of neon signs and loud flashing garb that each individual Casino uses to advertise its wares. The airport is located at the extreme Southern end of the Strip, so close in fact to several of the hotels, Tropicana, Luxor, that it appears that you can simply walk straight from the aeroplane cabin door directly into one of their air-conditioned plush interior lobbies, and check-in immediately. No such luck for me though...
Most of us on Flight NW015 from London Gatwick are British holidaymakers. That makes us, in theory, undesirable foreigners on Uncle Sams soil. Thus, we are made to endure a hideous US immigration system for what seems like hours, while we are questioned by typically weather-beaten American blondes with such jewels as "No fresh fruit allowed in the US - eat that banana now or drop it buster!", or "Youve spelt Nevada wrong on your visa waiver - to the back of the queue loser!". Yes, we’ve all been there, right?
Anyway, after what seems like days later (it was actually about ninety minutes), we were all through and into the main arrivals lounge. Across from the entrance I noticed my familiar neon sign, "Howdy, Welcome to Las Vegas....be LUCKY !". We’ll see..........
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