All Bets Are Off: Mai Tai Tom’s 66 Hours In Las Vegas

Chapter Three: Sunken Treasures To Neon Pleasures

Day Three: We’re Off The Hook, On A Roll, Somber Reminders, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, Don’t Lick The Iceberg, A Hull Of An Artifact, Where’s Bugsy?, Sigs Sign Everywhere A Sign, Stardust Memories, Between A Hard Rock & A Fun Place, Tres Merveilleux, No Rollercoasters & No Gambling

I went down early to the desk to see how much money we had “spent” on the infamous snack mini bar, and I guess we had put down the items before the meter started running, so thankfully we were off the hook. We had one more full day left in Vegas, and we decided to make the most of it. After meeting Kevin for breakfast at the Paris Las Vegas Mon Ami Gabi restaurant, where I devoured a cinnamon roll waffle that would have served the entire wedding party, Tracy and I sailed out to see a shipwreck.

Not just any shipwreck, however. The Luxor Hotel & Casino offers Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition, and we had purchased timed tickets ($34) online to take the self-guided tour. The 25,000 square-foot exhibition displays an array of items (more than 350) that have been collected from the ship that lies 2 1/2 miles below the North Atlantic. I said hello to Anubis, one of the most familiar gods of ancient Egypt, outside the hotel.

Before entering the exhibit we were given a boarding pass with the name of one of the actual passengers aboard the Titanic that fateful night. At that moment, I was thinking perhaps this was just going to be some cheesy tour. Instead, both Tracy and I were impressed by the entire experience, which was also very moving at times.

At the entrance is a miniature model of a Nautile submersible that three crew members would take down to Titanic’s ruins to retrieve artifacts. Being a tad claustrophobic, I could not imagine taking that tiny sub 2 1/2 feet down, much less 2 1/2 miles.

The first stop was a recreation of the ship’s mail room. How big was this ship? Besides the 2,240 passengers and crew, the ship carried 3,364 mailbags.

As we walked along there were placards on the wall telling stories about some of the passengers and crew. They were fascinating and many of them incredibly poignant. Rev. Thomas Byles was headed to the U.S. to officiate in his brother’s wedding and switched to the Titanic from another vessel. He refused on two occasions to get in a lifeboat in order to continue assisting many third class passengers up to the deck with lifeboats.

These stories were displayed throughout the experience, and it just seemed fate destined some of the people to be on this ship. (click on the photos and they enlarge to where you can read the stories)

Yep, this is “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.”

The richest person on the Titanic, John Jacob Astor, was worth about $87 million. In Walter Lord’s book, A Night to Remember, Lord wrote, “After [the Titanic] sank, the New York American broke the news on April 16 with a lead devoted almost entirely to John Jacob Astor; at the end it mentioned that 1,800 others were also lost.”

We then visited a replica of a third-class passenger room, which cost about $40. By comparison, Astor’s first-class room cost $4,500 (more than $100,000 in today’s dollars).

Second class was a tad cheaper than Astor’s room, but still pretty steep …  $1,776 (almost $11,000 today).

It’s remarkable to think that these fragile items survived the sinking and nearly 100 years …

… at the bottom of the ocean.

Deck signs, bathroom items along with even beer and wine bottles are displayed.

First-class passengers could enjoy the Promenade Deck which extended 500 feet on both sides of the ship. On this replica you can stroll and see what passengers looked out at on that dark, cold North Atlantic night. We learned that most of the passengers didn’t drown, but died of hypothermia from the 28-degree water.

The most lavish part of the Titanic was its magnificent Grand Staircase. This is also recreated in the exhibit (no photos). However, there is a photographer who will take a few pictures of you that you can purchase at the end of the tour. Being good consumers, we did purchase a couple. I really should have dressed better for the cruise. I hope we’re found.

If we’re not, at least I was romantic until the end.

Next we entered a room with a gigantic iceberg … and a number of noisy school children. They were enthralled with the iceberg, feeling it, with many of them licking the ice (I guess they’ve never seen A Christmas Story). One of them left this handprint.

I, of course, did the same thing until Tracy sighed, “Do you really want to put your hand where those kids just stuck their tongues? Tom, you idiot!” At least I didn’t yell, “I’m the King of the World!”

There was no moonlight on that fateful night so lookout Frederick Fleet had a rough time seeing if any icebergs were on the horizon. He could have used these binoculars that belonged to a passenger.

A docent told us how these dishes were meticulously collected from the ship.

These items remind us the voyage was no cup of tea.

Also in this room was a deck light and a Telemotor Wheel Hub, which Quartermaster Hichens tried to turn in a valiant attempt to avoid the iceberg. It was too late. Traveling at 22 knots, by the time the iceberg was spotted, he had no chance of changing the course of Titanic in time.

One of the binnacles for the navigational compass was also found.

There was a replica of the ship resting on the ocean floor.

This is all that remains of a deck bench.

These dress boots serve as a reminder of the many people who perished. More than 1,500 of the estimated 2,240 people on board were killed.

Finally, we came upon “The Big Piece,” so named because this actual giant section from the Titanic’s starboard hull weighs in the vicinity of 15 tons.

It is the largest piece of the Titanic ever raised from the ocean floor. Using lift bags, an expedition team was able to recover the 15-ton piece in 1998. According to what I read, “Nautile would secure the hull-piece with cables that would later be attached to floatation bags, and upon release, the flotation bags would lift the piece to the surface.” Pretty amazing to see.

At the end of the tour, we wanted to spend time looking up what happened to the people on our boarding passes. Unfortunately the 20+ students were there ahead of us, so it would have been a long wait. The Titanic exhibition is dedicated to the ship’s last living survivor.

We met back up with Kevin at Paris Las Vegas, and the three of us took last night’s short-cut over to the Flamingo. Since I had read all about mobster Bugsy Siegel at the Mob Museum a couple of days before, I wanted to stop by his monument at the hotel he founded. Interestingly, when we asked the hotel desk personnel where it was located, they didn’t have a clue. One person didn’t even know there was such a thing. If Bugsy had been alive, that guy probably would have been whacked. Finally, we learned the monument was near the wedding chapel in the gardens. We went “in search of” passing by flamingos hiding out in the rain. We at least saw a Flamingo sign.

After a couple of wrong turns, I found the monument, which was nothing special but fulfilled my Bugsy bingo card. Bugsy had a room with bulletproof windows at the Flamingo, but his Beverly Hills girlfriend did not have the same windows at her mansion where Bugsy was gunned down only six months after the Flamingo’s opening.

Back at Paris Las Vegas we grabbed a quick bite at Guy Fieri’s Flavortown, hopped in the car and made our way to The Neon Museum with the clever slogan, “History. Brought To Light.” I had heard great things about this museum and it was tops on my list for our Las Vegas visit (well, except for that whole wedding thing).

We arrived in late afternoon so we could see the signs in daylight, and then light up as night approached. The museum building where you enter was once the lobby of the 1961 La Concha Motel, which was designed by famous African American architect Paul Revere Williams. The lobby was donated in 2005 and had to be cut in eight pieces to be placed here. We’ll see the building lit in different colors later in the post.

We entered what is called The Boneyard, a term used to “refer to a place where signs are retired following their period of use.”

What’s hard to miss as we started our walk through the Boneyard was the museum’s largest restoration piece. You talk about “high strung!” Modeled after a Gibson Les Paul model played by The Who’s Pete Townshend, it stood for 26 years before the hotel closed in 2016. We’d see it at night later.

Famous hotel signs dot the Boneyard landscape.

I believe you needed a reservation to stay here. This is the oldest operational sign in the Neon Boneyard and dates way back to 1940.

My favorite all-time Vegas hotel was the Stardust.