LAX -> LAS

Few things are more LA than the Friday night drive to Vegas. Cram 4 dudes in a car with a handle of rye and a San Fran bag, 3 and a half hours later you're approaching the strip with a solid buzz and you're ready to check into the Cosmo and burn the town to ashes.

Or that's how it used to be. Vegas is now a town I avoid like the plague. Nothing good happens there. You spend thousands of dollars of money that you don't have on terrible things that make you feel like a horrible person. There is no look of shame quite like the Sunday guy leaving Vegas who lost 2 grand on the craps table then spent an additional 3 thousand on strippers and an 8 ball of baking powder. This guy is now 5 grand lighter in the pockets and probably didn't even get to shoot any ropes (depending on how classy the strip club was or wasn't) I've never been this guy as I have never in my life had 5,000 dollars. But I see this guy, you can see them sweating after they strike out with prostitutes coming up the escalator at Drai's, trying to get back to their hotel room before the sun rises, only to have to sleep on the floor for 45 minutes before his buddy with the car is ready to leave. This guy probably doesn't even get shotgun, and oh by the way the drive back to LA somehow takes 8 hours instead of 3, and the temperatures average 110 degrees.

I've considered exploiting this misery in the form of a Tumblr "Sunday leaving Vegas" it is literally a time devoid of happiness, all the endorphines that have been snorted up your nose are now leaking through your pores at an alarmingly gross rate. Vegas is the worst. I hate it and I'm never going back.

But.

Maybe it's not THAT bad. I mean any place you can drink up and down the strip and debauchery is encouraged can't be awful right? I mean I am a hedonistic individual, this should be my playground. So I digress, Vegas isn't all bad. And with a little strategy, you too can conquer Vegas.

24 Hours in Vegas...
I have a friend getting married in a couple months and his bachelor party is in Vegas. Classic bachelor weekend getaway. I didn't think I could swing it because the timing isn't great for me and my car's air conditioning died last week. A rational person would probably get the air conditioning fixed, but it's chronically 68 degrees where I live, so it would be easier to just avoid deserts. I was just about to send the email that I was flaking on the bachelor party (I had only committed to Saturday because anything longer than 1 day in Vegas is too much) and then, just to check out the landscape, I did one of my favorite things to do, drunkenly got on Kayak.

Most of the pain points of the Vegas trip revolve around getting there. I mean obviously you spend a ton of money, but if it weren't for the misery of driving there and back alone, I probably could swing it. So remove that variable. What's a flight to Vegas from LA like 200 bucks maybe?

30. 30 dollars to Vegas on Saturday.

You can't turn an opportunity like that down. I immediately booked without even looking at the times of the flight. I come out of my drunken haze yesterday and realize that my flight takes off at 6 am Saturday morning. Again, it would probably be best if I just stayed in Friday night, went to bed super early and set my alarm for 4 am and then went really hard Saturday to compensate for only having half a weekend.

But, that would be boring. So as it stands now my plan is to go out hard tomorrow night, when the bar closes I will convince someone to have an afterparty until 4 am or so and then head to the airport with 6 or 7 single serve shot bottles. This should ensure that I am allowed to keep drinking at a steady pace during the 2am to 6am alcohol blackout in the state of California and keep me pretty close to blackout status until I land in Vegas...at 7:30am.

This my friends, is when I have to make a snap decision. I can power through and do a straight 48, or I can try to wake my friends up and go crash on the floor or something. I'm thinking the straight 48 for several reasons...

1. The rest of the bachelor party is already there. And they were all division 1 athletes in college. I'm not saying that someone that drank sparingly in college is unable to rage for 4 days in Vegas, I'm just fairly sure that an adrenaline shot of a new arrival could inject new life. (Also I'm taking a shit ton of adderall)

2. This is a hybrid bachelor/bachelorette party. I don't really know what this entails at all. Are their like group dinners and then each group splits off to a different strip club? Do they get bottles together?
Don't know but I'm fairly sure that everyone probably pairs off at the end of the night and bangs it out, or at least that's what happened in the movie Bachelorette. None of the girls except the bride know me so I do have the "new guy" thing going for me, but if I can show up drunk and sustain for the rest of the day I'm sure that at least one of them will think that's awesome. It would be much cooler than showing up Saturday and promptly going to sleep.

I assume the rest of the day will be pretty standard Vegas. Get those big ass yards of strawberry daquiri, walk the strip, hang out at the pool, go to dinner, pregame really hard, go to some club, almost pick up a hot chick, fail, go to the casino until 4 in the morning, try to sleep, pis myself, wake up. Bachelor party over. I'm sure it will be awesome.

I don't have a flight back yet...I'll figure it out later, or maybe I'll fly back to Chicago. Or maybe I'll just get a shitty room in Vegas Sunday night and go see a show. It's going to be a benderific weekend, and it's probably fiscally irresponsible being that I don't have a fixed income right now, but I've never gone on an impulsive trip and then regretted it. I've NOT gone and regretted it plenty of times. Things work themselves out, so as long as I can hook myself up to one of those emergency Vegas IV drips Sunday morning, everything should turn out fine...and this should be the best bachelor party yet.