Due to either being lazy or having a case of not yet diagnosed ADD, I have not written anything in a long time. There IS hope though, I'm back...and we almost got shot in Vegas.
I planned a trip to Las Vegas for St. Patrick's Day with my wife and we also met up with my best friend and his girlfriend. From the moment we got there my wife was intrigued at the fact that people are willing to sit inside of a glass case filled with cigarette smoke just to play slot machines at the airport. I think she would rather put cat litter on her ice cream than stand inside of that glass box.
We get in the cab to go to The Mirage and have our first experience of a cab driver trying to gauge us on the tip. "I'm not gonna put my daughter through college on two dollars" says the driver about a two dollar tip for a nine dollar cab ride (6 long Vegas blocks). I will not bore you with all of the normal Vegas stories, let's get to the near death experience.
My friend wanted to go off the strip at about three in the morning to eat at a place called "Pho Kim Long", if you say it fast people will look at you funny. It is located in the China Town district and is open all night with very good Pho and other Vietnamese food. After we finished eating we did what gentleman do and went out in the cold to wave down non existent taxi's on the highway while our women stayed in the restaurant. No luck. We went inside and had them call us a cab.
When the cab driver picked us up he made it a point to let us know that he just got done driving a celebrity around. I asked him who it was and he said "you wouldn't know him" at which point I called him a dick inside of my head. He begins to drive us back to our hotel at which point he gets stuck behind a really slow driver in a five dollar car and he honks while flashing his lights at them. Bad idea. They slam on the breaks to try and cause the cab to hit them from behind but our driver braked in time to avoid it.
The slow car pulls forward a bit and our driver shifts one lane to the right and starts driving toward a red light almost adjacent to the slow driver. The slow driver suddenly rolled down the passenger window with a FUCKING GUN and was probably about to kill us all just because he got honked and flashed at for driving like an idiot. I was in the passenger seat, even if he had just shot the cab driver I'd have been covered in the aftermath. Since I'm writing this I guess it is obvious that our cab driver decided to speed up ALOT and run the red light, suddenly he was hugging every corner until we were in the general viscinity of The Mirage.
I tipped him extra for being quick on his feet even though he partly initiated the conflict, at least we're not dead. I've had a lot of near death experiences so I'd say this one didn't scare me as much as the others, but I was certainly thanking the Universe for maintaining a good balance and not allowing us to end up a statistic.
Lesson: There is plenty to do on the strip at 3AM, pho can wait until daylight.
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