I Fought the Laughlin and the Laughlin Won

Part of the 30 for 30 list included visiting Laughlin. Granted I admit this was a bit of a cop out as my parents were already planning a trip and I was taking a day down there to visit them. But I've never visited before so why not scratch a place off the to visit list.

I have never been down to Laughlin, I have driven past a few times, but never stopped. I will admit, everything I had heard about Laughlin was pretty much dead on. There are a few nice places, the limits are low, the staffs are really friendly, and the average age of the customers is somewhere around 125. I kid you not I'm fairly certain I was the youngest non-employee in the entire hotel.

While the average age may have been pushing triple digits, I did notice a few things I liked in Laughlin that I wish would be in Vegas. The river was beautiful, it was crystal clear, and they had a nice riverwalk, I grew up in a city with a lake and never realized how much I missed the water until I moved to the middle of the desert. Another thing I noticed was the lack of children, granted this may be due to the fact that most of the visitors are well past their child bearing years, but it amazed me to be walking between casinos and not having to dodge strollers and kids on leashes, there wasn't the constant whine of crying children, and I like that. Also in Laughlin there are no porn slappers, timeshare hawkers, or night/strip club guys, which was a nice added bonus.

My only major gripes, the casinos are a far bit apart I guess I'm getting spoiled by the close proximity of the vegas casinos, but it seemed like a bit of a trek to get from one end of the Laughlin Strip to the other. We ended up spending most of our time @ Don Laughlin's Riverside which was where we were staying.

The Riverside was a nice little casino, you can tell it's a little old in years, but everything was kept in decent order. The room was nice, but not overbearing, the casino was small and took a few minutes to familiarize yourself with but after a lap or 2 you knew the lay of the land. The one thing that kept sticking out to me was that by the pit and poker room, there were a large bank of windows that overlook the river. I just couldn't get over the fact that you could clearly see outside and the casino had no problem with that. In Vegas, it always appears to be noon when you are inside, however in Laughlin you could see the fact that it was night or day and for some reason that seemed odd to me.

One of the biggest selling points about Laughlin is the fact that everything is HELLA cheap. The room rates are about the same as vegas, but the food was WAY WAY cheaper. The buffet was cheap, the Prime Rib Room was cheap, the snack bar was cheap, everything was about half the price as it was in Vegas, if not cheaper.

I took a few photos, but there really isn't a lot to report back, I got my butt kicked at most of the games, the poker gods still hate me, and well that's about it.

View from the Room, the river and mountains were a nice thing to see in the morning.



Prime Rib from the Prime Rib Room, and no I didn't eat them both the one on the left is my moms. Very good meal have to thank Vinny for the recommendation.


There was one odd thing, Laughlin is right on the NV, AZ border and since AZ doesn't observe daylight savings time, if you crossed the river it was 1 hour ahead of NV time. Now this wouldn't be a big deal, however with cellphones things got a little tricky, if you were catching signal from an AZ tower it was a different time than if you were catching from a NV tower. There were times when I would move from one side of a table to the other and the time would change an hour. Luckily we weren't really on a set schedule, but it was a little confusing at times.

All in all it was a fun trip, I got to spend some time with the parentals, and had some great food. Not back to your regularly programmed randomness