I think this is the last part of this series. I noticed a couple of interesting things on my recent five-night stay in Las Vegas, one being the sign on the hotel formerly known as Treasure Island…
Treasure Island opened in 1993, back when most new hotels had to have themes. This one's was piracy…and when you think about a place where you want to gamble, don't you dearly want to be surrounded by pirates? Outside on the Strip, there was a free show in a man-made lake called Buccaneer Bay. It was staged several times an evening — two motorized ships would engage in battle and at the end of it, one of them would sink and its band of cutthroats (live actors) would wind up in the (hopefully, heated) lagoon.
One Christmas, my partner Sergio Aragonés and I were there for a bookstore appearance and the lagoon had been drained for maintenance work. You could see all the mechanics — tracks and gizmos — that enabled the sinkable ship to sail into battle against the other one and then sink. It was kinda fascinating and it inspired a story we did in an issue of Groo all about a scam with a ship that was designed to sink and then rise up again.
In 2003, Treasure Island got rid of that show. Buccaneer Bay became Sirens' Cove and in the new show — "The Sirens of TI" — one team of pirates consisted of sexy ladies who vanquished a competing ship filled with bare-chested stuntmen. That show also lasted ten years. It closed in 2013 and there is no replacement since the hotel is shedding its pirate theme, bit by bit. It's no longer Treasure Island. It's now T.I. and I'm guessing the sub-name "Treasure Island" and maybe its initials will go away in a few years.
"Theme" hotels are no longer "in." Makes you wonder what the hotel Paris, if it goes that route, can do about that 33-stories-tall Eiffel Tower out front or how New York, New York could de-theme itself when it has a 150-foot-tall Statue of Liberty and a scale model of the Empire State Building.
Anyway, what I found interesting about the big T.I. sign was the big proclamation of FREE PARKING on it. A lot of Vegas hotels have taken to charging you to come there and lose money on their slot machines. It's one of those things that, like I mentioned here, they've learned they can get away with. Few visitors balk at paying it. I believe the MGM-owned casinos started the practice and many a Vegas pundit predicted they'd back down when it drove hordes of players to other hotels. This did not happen so other hotels starting doing charging for parking…and every so often, they raise prices and people still pay it.
The new owner of T.I. decided to see if it would drive players into driving to his hotel. So far, it apparently hasn't done that.
Meanwhile, I wanted to show you this which I found in the food court at the Fashion Show Mall. You can click on this photo to make it bigger…
It's called the Pharmabox and it's a vending machine that dispenses things you'd buy at a CVS Pharmacy or Walgreens: Beauty products, pain killers, antacids, etc. It seemed a little odd to me that there were all these fast food stands around and right in the middle of them, they're selling Zantac and Pepcid.
And Advil. If you look at the enlarged photo, you can see they stock a lot of Advil. Shouldn't these machines be closer to the casinos?
I think that's all I have from my last Vegas expedition but today or maybe the day after, I'll be posting a story from a Vegas trip from some time ago. Hope you enjoy it.