We thought that the Venetian was one of Las Vegas’s most unique Hotels. Come to find out it’s actually a hideous psychological experiment that had us in its clutches for most of the day.
It all started at the Self Park. The signs were confusing and the underground parking labyrinth we were dumped into was convoluted and dark.
We all paid attention to where we parked – Grammy and Symone always come up with a mnemonic device to remember where we leave the car. We walked through the hotel lobby and noted the giant, really hard to miss, naked women carved in crystal. Emmett’s big insight at that junction of our journey made the landmark even more memorable, “Why is everything naked around this town?!”.
We went up escalators and down elevators and wandered a maze of decorative halls with the ‘streetmosphere’ and ‘Grand Canal’ as our target destinations.
There was something sinister in the vague way the directional signs kind of pointed to the right, but if you looked again they pointed to the left. The building was huge! We walked and walked but found the destination always out of reach. We asked for directions from an older blond security guard but when we followed them we ended up somewhere else.
We finally emerged outdoors and not at all where we thought we should be. The kids were starting to lose it. As we were regrouping we looked over to find Emmett with half his clothes off. Apparently he was hot.
We began our journey back to the car. This is when things got weird. We followed signs to the Self Park to find the way changed in every way. Nothing looked familiar. We took the elevator down to P1 to find no cars at all.
I asked for directions again and was kind of wigged out to note the same older blond security guard who didn’t remember us at all…and we aren’t easy to forgot.
We wandered with purpose only to back-track our steps 30 minutes later. We were past losing it. We couldn’t escape the Venetian. It was feeding on our misery.
Grammy made a bold move to strike back at the organism holding us captive by stealing pens. Emmett expressed his displeasure by smearing foam hand sanitizer all over his face and Noble and Oscar started spitting.
All of these weird and primitive acts seemed to break the building’s hold on us because we inexplicably arrived back at the naked crystal women. It was only a matter of moments before we saw a chain of familiar landmarks and made our whining, crying, back arching escape.
We spent 4 hours on the inside and only had a wet diaper, a bad attitude, and some chocolate smeared hands to show for it.
