Word: stripped
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...have come for revenge. For years, I've hyperventilated at restaurant "tasting menu" checks, forfeited 1,000% markups for bottle service at clubs, neared my credit-card limit for hotel suites, paid usury to strip-club ATMs and pushed far too many chips to the dealer. On this trip, I will get a hotel room for less than the upkeep on the room, eat a meal for near what it costs to serve it and - at least according to a sign in the Cheetahs dressing room berating the strippers for undercharging - get some kind of deal in the VIP room...
...dance in every lap! - into a permanent installation of insanity. If we decide that we don't need a resort town that's roughly the same size as Washington, D.C. (which Las Vegas is) - that we can't continue to devote as many resources to gambling, tasting menus, spas, strip joints and nightclubs as we do to our national government - then we finally revert from being a nation of optimistic materialism to one of Puritan thrift. The one that not even Cotton Mather could get Americans to buy. (See 10 things to do in Las Vegas...
...turn out of my hotel's full parking lot, veering onto the Strip, I come across something rarely seen in Vegas: frozen construction projects. I pass cranes abandoned at the site of the Echelon, a huge, multibillion-dollar project of four hotels that is now just three buildings of nine floors of concrete and steel beams sitting idly on some of the most expensive real estate in the country. I pass three more abandoned sites - 63 empty steel floors of the Fontainebleau, a sad unfinished shell that was supposed to be Caesars Palace's Octavius Tower and two cranes halted...
...spirited traveler, the safari itself is the key. Our adventure began after our twin-prop touched down at a remote bush landing strip at Kimanjo, deep in Laikipia. From there it was a Land Cruiser ride to our first camp, set beneath acacia and a vast sycamore fig. Here we met the troop in its full glory: 19 camels and 15 Samburu, Turkana and Masai tribesmen. The sense of joining an ancient caravan heading into the bush was heightened by the fact that there would be almost no contact with the outside world for several days...
...41pm: We walk to the waterfront, where the Danube and Sava rivers converge, to meet friends at Cantina de Frida, the former home of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, located on a long strip of trendy lounges...