Someone once described Las Vegas...

...to me as "Disneyland for adults." And he was right.

The hotels that line the Strip, such as Caesar's Palace (above), the first one my son and I saw after getting off the highway, are all enormous and have a theme -- a schtick, if you will.

After Caesar's comes Bellagio, with its fountains:

Then Paris, complete with its own Eiffel Tower:

Followed by Planet Hollwood, Monte Carlo, MGM Grand, and finally our hotel, New York, New York (below):

There were others, of course, but these were the ones that stick out in my mind.

We checked into our room just as the sun was setting and immediately set out to explore the Strip. My son was wide-eyed, taking pictures on his iPhone; he was awestruck in a way that I hadn't seen since he was a kid. But Vegas has that effect on people.

One of the first things I noticed about the Strip was the people -- there were thousands and thousands and thousands of them, mostly just walking around. And they all seemed to have tattoos! (What's up with that?) Some of the guys had tattoos that covered their entire arms. Not to be outdone, many women had large tattoos on their legs. And I thought to myself: that can't look good when they're in a nice dress and high heels. 

And a subset of these people were standing on street corners handing out what appeared to be, at first glance, baseball cards. Except, upon closer inspection, instead of professional athletes the cards had pictures of scantily clad women. What do you suppose that was all about? (Prostitution, which is legal in the rest of Nevada, is against the law in Las Vegas. It was a little awkward for my son and me.)

We pressed on, and saw the fountains at Bellagio before ducking inside to try our hand at some gambling. As the World's Worst Gambler, I gave my son the best fatherly advice I could: roulette is the fastest way to lose money, slot machines are mindless, and craps -- the game for real gamblers -- is way too complicated (and fast-moving). No, our game would be blackjack, which I had actually played before.

So we got a beer from the bar, a couple hundred bucks from an ATM and carefully selected what we thought was the hottest ten-dollar table in the joint. (Turns out it cooled off the minute we sat down -- such luck!) But the dealer was a kindly old man, a successful gambler by his own admission (aren't all dealers?) who made dropping a C-Note in fifteen minutes about as pleasant as possible. But this was really the best fatherly advice I could give my son: casinos are for suckers.

Again, we moved on down the Strip, this time to Caesar's, where I couldn't wait to show him the Sports Book. We had hoped to place a bet on the Bears to win the Super Bowl, but it was closed. (And much smaller than I remember, too. It was one of the few disappointments of our trip.)

So we crossed the street and walked past Paris, where my son remarked that while the architects got the design of the buildings right, they were a little off on the scale. I'd say; the hotel was much larger than any structure I had seen in the City of Light -- or the whole continent of Europe, for that matter. But, hey, this is Vegas.

By this time the drive was catching up to us so we went back to our room and collapsed on the beds. We only stuck around Sin City for about twelve hours in all. On Monday we were scheduled to check into Joe's room in a frat house at UCLA. We had to be up and at 'em by seven o'clock the next morning.

But I think he got a nice introduction to Las Vegas.