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Carrion Luggage
Carrion Luggage
 
Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem.
This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it.
It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans.
It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier."
I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination.
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I couldn't let this hate-review from SFGate go by without comment.
Who the hell wrote this? Someone working for the competition? There's a lot of competition there, but I'd suspect Harrah's (owner of Caesar's Palace).
And within 10 minutes of my arriving at Luxor, it was clear why it’s one of the most reviled hotels in Las Vegas.
Really? Because within 10 minutes of me arriving there, I'm already relaxed and ready to gamble.
I pulled into the porte cochere shortly before noon and headed inside with my luggage in tow. Hoping to stow my bag while I explored the resort, I walked over to the bell services desk. The employee gestured for me to come closer, then angrily pointed behind me.
“That’s the line,” she said.
I turned to see a queue about 10 feet away. It extended all the way through the lobby to the casino floor.
Okay, a few things to unpack here.
Let's start with the last bit. That makes it sound like the lines at Disney. This is bullshit. There's not much space between the front desk and the casino floor.
Now, and here's the major, epic fail of this takedown piece: the author is channeling Yogi Berra here. "No one goes there anymore. It's too crowded."
So now I begin to suspect that this writer, "mortified" (her own word) at her faux pas, simply got a bad first impression and then found everything she could to rag on.
Then, by some miracle, I got a text: My room was ready. I passed two broken moving walkways, a closed cafe and a long, blank wall lined with employee-only doors before finding the ancient-looking bank of elevators.
Yeah, I know that route. I also know the quicker, alternative route, which takes you through the casino floor. Had she gone that way, she might have written about how the hotel forces you through the noisy, flashy, money-sucking part of the first floor. As for broken walkways, yeah, that happens in an aging building. I've never seen the place not having some sort of construction going on.
Finally, it's not like elevators were a thing in ancient Egypt. The least they can do is style them like older elevators.
When the first one opened, the electrical panel was exposed, wires spilling out. The doors shuddered shut, and the ascent began. Because Luxor is a pyramid, the elevators are more like funiculars, climbing sideways at a 39-degree angle.
Okay, okay, I'll grant that the exposed wires, which seem to be confirmed by a pic in the article, are a major fail on the part of maintenance and/or management. While there are laws about under-21s in casino areas in Vegas, plenty of families stay in the hotels. I'm not a big "think of the children" person, but kids do have a tendency to get curious about stuff like that.
The elevators rattle uncontrollably, shaking the occupants like a martini all the way up. They’re also incredibly slow. I was on the 21st floor, and it took over a minute to get there.
Waaah, they're slow. I think of them as Wonkavators. They are a bit rumbly and shaky, but that's part of their charm. As I put it to anyone in there with me (captive audience), "Hey, we came here to gamble, right?"
Things did not improve when I reached the room. As I closed the door behind me, I saw that there was no deadbolt, no bar lock, no privacy latch.
Okay, first of all, I've been in lots of hotels, from fleabags in rural Montana to the Ritz-Carlton in DC, so I don't recall specifically if the Luxor rooms lack those features. Seems to me they do have them, but it's possible that some rooms don't.
Second, the pyramid is not the only place to stay there. They have two "tower" facilities with more traditional elevators and rooms without sloping walls. As I recall, you only pick the pyramid rooms by your own choice.
Does Luxor mistrust its guests so much that it doesn’t provide interior locks? I wondered how many times a day its staff had to force their way into rooms, and why.
Look, I'm no expert on the hotel industry, but management has ways to bypass those "security" features. People die in hotel rooms on a regular basis (not because they're in hotel rooms, but just because a lot of people stay in hotels and everyone dies at some point). Also, let's not forget that Luxor is immediately adjacent to, and for a long time shared an owner with, Mandalay Bay, and Mandalay Bay was where the infamous concert shooter stayed.
The dark exterior of Luxor made for a perpetual tint in the room, worsened by the fact that one of the windowpanes was crusted in desert dust. This is probably a great setup for someone with a blistering hangover, but it gave a depressing pallor to the space.
Counterpoint: "I couldn't sleep in because the room was too bright!"
There were two positives. One was the Wi-Fi, which was strong enough to seamlessly maintain a video call.
You're on the 21st floor of the pyramid, and you're trusting the hotel Wee-Fee over your phone's hotspot? Your priorities are backwards.
The other was the toilet, which flushed with the force of a cruise ship lavatory.
I'm glad she counts that as a positive, but the engineer in me wants to know how they get pressures like that at the top. Is there a hidden water tank at the tip of the pyramid? The tip which famously has a giant sun-bright spotlight pointing at the stars?
If you’re eating at the Luxor buffet, this is no doubt a hygienic necessity.
I don't get the love for buffets. I've never eaten at that one. I only eat at buffets when my friends pressure me into it. If there's one thing that Vegas doesn't lack, it's casinos. If there's another, it's restaurants, including ones where you don't have to do half the work.
The article goes into some of the property's history, which is interesting but somewhat irrelevant. Then:
Stripped of its novelty, though, the gloomy interior is now bare and brutalist.
You say that like it's a bad thing. It is not.
With limited food options at the hotel, I ate elsewhere for dinner.
I will grant that, compared to some other Vegas properties, the Luxor has fewer dining options. There's a food court for fast food, a breakfast/lunch diner style area, a deli, a couple of Starsuckses, a tequila bar with food, a sushi place (which is incidentally very good), and the aforementioned buffet. This is "limited" in Vegas, true, but when you consider that all you have to do is ride up an escalator to the passageway between Luxor and Mandalay Bay, which is a mall with various shopping options and, yes, many restaurants, this complaint falls short for me.
That night, afraid of falling asleep without a security lock, I dragged an armchair in front of my door. At $299.32 for two nights, it felt particularly absurd to be redesigning the room for safety.
I don't mean to be rude or anything (okay, I kinda do), but that exhibits a level of paranoia I just can't get behind. Like I said, hotel staff can burst into a room at any time if they have to. And anyone who's not staff shouldn't have a key. Hell, those rickety gambling Wonkavators won't even take you to your floor if you don't use your room key (unless, I suppose, the panel's broken and the wiring's exposed, which, as I said, is one legitimate complaint).
And, I might add: $300 for two nights? What the Egyptian Underworld? I've never paid more than $50 for a night, and it's usually even less because it's comped (yes, this means I spent more at the blackjack tables, but ignore that).
After a fitful night’s sleep, I stumbled down to the lobby Starbucks.
Which one? Seriously, the overabundance of Starsucks is my second-biggest problem with Luxor, after the really quite tiny and understaffed high-stakes table games room. Okay, no, third, after the high-stakes room and their deal with Pepsi (I'm a die-hard Coke guy).
Now, look, I know tastes are different. You want high-end? Plenty of other options in Vegas. You want real cheap? Those options exist, too, usually without the shows and casinos. Luxor may not be "cool," but it's cheap (this author got price-gouged, sorry) and the beds are comfortable, especially if you stay in one of the towers instead of the pointy thing.
Las Vegas properties have a relatively short half-life. Luxor has already passed that point. I fully expect it to go the way of Golden Nugget and other casinos that were the Vegas version of historical-register buildings.
Meanwhile, though, I wasn't about to let this absolute hit-piece stand without comment. |
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