A Vegas St. Patrick's Day

Is St. Patrick's Day a lot bigger in Philadelphia than in most other places in the country? I mean, I know New York gets wild, and Scranton's celebration is surprisingly huge, but I guess I never really thought about the rest of the country. Las Vegas, strangely, doesn't have many notable St. Patrick's Day festivities. That didn't stop us from dressing in green and hitting the town to find some fellow Irish folk with green beer on their minds.

Yes, I figured out how to set a timer on my camera.

There was no parade to attend, none in walking distance anyway. There was a small-town parade in the neighboring hamlet of Henderson, but that would've required us to 1) be there at 10 AM, and 2) take an excruciatingly long bus ride (and 3, I guess, would be us betting our horses on being allowed to drink at the parade. Vegas is more lenient about open container laws than anywhere in the country, but the town next door might not be). So we skipped the Henderson Irish party and stayed local.

And staying local pretty much just means walking up and down the Strip and drinking. Which was fine! I enjoy the Strip, and I enjoy Pam's company, so we had a swell afternoon. It started as any day at the Strip should, at the Bellagio water show. We have already seen one of their shows, yes, and in fact we already saw the same specific show that we saw yesterday afternoon, but goddamn is it beautiful.

The water itself is pretty, but when paired up with this song, I swear to God I got a tear in my eye. I didn't want to take a video and have it look bad and ruin it, so you'll just have to see it for yourself.

But enough crying, it was time to party. After a lunch of a few slices of pizza, we found a cool little block party next to an Irish bar named O'Sheas. They had a cover band playing classic rock, and they were killing it (the drummer was awesome).

Pam was dancing a lot, as she is often inclined to do. But there's only so much Irish dancing you can do, so we packed it up and decided to travel downtown to Fremont Street.

"Why do all the pictures have to be of me?" "Trust me, the world thanks you, this way they don't have to see my ugly mug."

Fremont Street wasn't as crowded because by the time we got there, due to it being cold and rainy. No joke. It was most likely the one and only day the weather is worse here than it is in Philly. You guys got to enjoy sun and pleasant breezes. Meanwhile, Pam and I were huddled under a roof, shuddering with only a 24 oz. PBR to keep us warm.

Fortunately, that didn't last, so we kept walking, and hit some of our favorite Fremont spots—the Heart Attack Grill for huge cheap beers and french fries (fried in pure lard, of course), and the Mermaid Casino, whose bar sold huge piña coladas. Check it:

Mixed drinks aren't really my thing (though, I'll admit, the blood orange mojitos we had at a tapas place the other day were indeed pretty bangin'), so I stuck with the green beer.

After the rain cleared up, again, we rocked out to some Irish bands. There's nothing better than drinking and listening to some Irish rock music on St. Patrick's Day

The Fremont Street Experience is really neat how it's set up. It's one long street, and go right down the street a few dozen feet in the air is a zip line. I took a video of the set-up for y'all (making it my official second uploaded YouTube video. The first).

Tomorrow is Pam's birthday, and we're definitely zip-lining tomorrow afternoon.

Look who we met:

I figured Aunt Dee Dee would appreciate this one.

All this dancing and walking was making us hungry, so we went to a fish place on a deck where another cover band was playing (seriously, a lot of bands got work yesterday) and I got the most delicious grilled Mahi Mahi sandwich I've ever had, rivaled only perhaps by the fried grouper sandwiches we were eating in Clearwater exactly one year ago (no Crab Traps to wash them down this time though).

For once, Pam was the load that spilled her drink.

It was still really cold and we had a long journey ahead of us to get back to the Can, so we called it a night at Fremont Street. As always, good times. And, as always, we got lost YET AGAIN trying to find the bus. Seriously, the freaking Bonneville Transportation Center is like our Ark of the Covenant; we've tried for millions of years to find it, always to come up short every time.

But find the bus we did, on some random street, somehow, and made it home for some nice hot tub time.

Homeless man walks by outside the (locked) gate: "What, are you guys from the North Pole or something?! It's freezing out here!"