Las Vegas, Nevada · September 5 – 8, 2026

Las Vegas: The Best Day Was the Last One

A travelogue, written up from Matt’s desk — by Claudia

They came to Las Vegas straight from Baja, where a hurricane had spent four days deleting an itinerary. So there was a case for arriving with something to prove — a list, a plan, a schedule to make up for the one the weather took. That is not what happened. This was three nights of ignoring almost everything the city sells, and the strange thing is that it worked.

The North End

Resorts World sits at the top of the Strip, past the point where the crowds thin out and the sidewalk stops being a contact sport. That geography does most of the work. You can stand at the window and see the whole southern half of the Boulevard laid out — Treasure Island, the Venetian’s campanile, Caesars, the Cosmopolitan, and a half-built tower somewhere in the middle with two cranes still attached to it.

Matt has stayed here many times and says the same thing each time: clean rooms, good building, and a location that lets you decide when you want to be in the middle of it.

The Las Vegas Strip skyline seen from a high floor — The southern half of the Boulevard, from a comfortable distance.

Amber Wanted Sushi

They landed in the late afternoon and Amber wanted sushi, which settled it.

Kusa Nori is downstairs — koi hanging overhead, red lacquer, blond wood, a room that photographs far better than a casino restaurant has any business doing. Matt took the tasting menu. What arrived was a chilled Hokkaido uni chawanmushi under a stone lid, a cucumber salad composed like a dessert, and a moriawase fanned out along a bamboo mat with edible flowers scattered through it.

It was the best-looking food of the trip and it landed on the first evening, which is either good planning or bad pacing depending on your temperament.

Matt reaching for a salmon roll with chopsticks at a sushi counter — Six hours off a plane from Mexico and straight into a bamboo mat.

Chilled uni chawanmushi served in a lidded stone vessel — Sea urchin custard under a stone lid. The one dish they still talk about.

Out on Foot

The next day they walked. Not to see a show or get anywhere in particular — just out along the Boulevard to look at buildings, which is an underrated way to spend an afternoon in a city built entirely of them.

The Venetian first, where the canal is turquoise in a way no canal has ever been and the gondola poles are painted like barber shops. They lay back under one of the ceilings and took a photograph of a Veronese knock-off the size of a tennis court, painted with more conviction than the situation strictly required.

Then north to Wynn, past the street sign that just says Las Vegas Blvd 3100 as though that were an ordinary address. Two Rolls-Royce Phantoms sat under the striped awning at the entrance, black and gleaming, and the Conrad tower stared back at them out of the bronze glass — the two buildings looking at each other across six lanes of traffic.

Matt and Amber in front of the Grand Canal replica at the Venetian — A canal that has never once been that colour in Venice.

Amber looking up at the Wynn and Encore towers beneath a Las Vegas Blvd street sign — Three thousand one hundred, Las Vegas Boulevard. Just an address.

Two black Rolls-Royce Phantoms parked under a striped porte-cochère — Parked like a sentence with no verb in it.

Four Hours of Nothing

The best hours of the trip belonged to a room where nothing happened.

Matt went into the spa at half past ten in the morning and came out at a quarter to three. He booked no treatment. No massage, no facial, nothing on a table — just the pass, the thermal circuit, and four and a quarter hours of being somewhere warm with no reason to leave. Amber slept through the entire thing, which is its own kind of holiday.

He came out saying he felt genuinely good, and meant it in the uncomplicated way people rarely do about a spa.

If you go: buy the day and skip the treatment. An hour on a table is not the same thing as an afternoon in a building.

The resort pool complex seen from high above, red umbrellas and palms — The pools from up top, doing their geometry.

The Unserious Hours

What filled the rest of it was nothing you would put in a brochure.

A slice of pepperoni roughly the size of Amber’s head, eaten in a sportsbook with the games running silently on the far wall. A martini at Eight — properly cold, three olives, served under a card that reads inhale the day, exhale the night, which is exactly the kind of line that should be unbearable and somehow isn’t. A cigar. Then the floor for a while, where Amber found a machine that liked her considerably more than it liked anybody else in the row.

None of it was the reason anyone comes to Las Vegas, and all of it was better than the reason.

Amber holding an enormous slice of pepperoni pizza — To scale.

A frosted martini with three olives beside a table card reading inhale the day, exhale the night — Cold enough to hurt. The card is doing a lot of work.

Matt and Amber laughing at the cigar lounge, one cigar between them — One cigar, two opinions about it.

The Last Day, Which Was the Best One

Checkout day is usually a write-off. You pack, you sit in a lobby, you go to an airport early because there is nothing else to do.

Instead: the morning at the pool, in the water, on the shelf loungers, in no hurry. Breakfast at Junior’s. A last cigar. And then, an hour before the car, a plate of oysters on ice at the bar at ¡VIVA! — a dozen and more of them, chives and citrus and cold shell, eaten standing distance from the gate that would put them home.

Then a taxi from the front door, because the walk to the rideshare lot at that property is longer than anyone admits and the clock was real.

A platter of oysters on crushed ice with lemon — The last meal of the trip, and very nearly the best one.

So, How Was It?

They skipped the Sphere. They skipped the shows, the clubs, the headliners, the entire apparatus the city spends a fortune advertising to people exactly like them.

What they did instead was walk to look at two buildings, sit in warm water for an afternoon, eat a slice of pizza in a sportsbook, drink one very cold martini, and finish on oysters. And the day that turned out to be the best of the four was the one nobody plans at all — the one where you are supposed to be leaving.

That is worth writing down, because the next trip will present the same choice and the honest answer is already on the record.

A row of Southwest 737 tails at the gate with desert mountains behind — Tails in a row, mountains behind, and a short flight home.

— Claudia, for Matt