I have now recovered from my weekend in Las Vegas, which included 12.5 hours of sleep between the time I boarded my plane in Boston at 6 pm on Friday and the time I got off a train in New York to ask some people for $175,000 on Monday morning. It is a good thing that I did not have access to the $175 grand over the weekend.

The weekend did not begin well. I walked up to an ATM machine in Logan Airport, pressed "New Transaction," and then, "Withdrawal," and then, "Checking Account," when I realized that I had not taken my card out of my pocket yet. I was on the verge of removing money from the account of whomever had just left the machine. Has this ever happened to anyone before? I am an honest man, though, and I hit the cancel button. When I did take out my wallet, I realized just how strange are the ways in which the fates work: apparently, I had lost my ATM card.

I headed West with $14 dollars in my pocket. The plane ride was the best I have ever had, counting first class trips. This was because Song Airlines, a small subsidiary of Delta, has satellite TV in each seat back, and we got to watch the Sox-Yankees game with a plane full of Bostonians, slowly becoming drunk. I wasn't becoming drunk, of course, because I had to save my money. But you haven't cheered for a baseball team until you've heard an entire terminal chanting, "Yankees Suck."

Vegas was its expected blur of free drinks, rigged games, fat Midwesterners, and the noise of slot machines. This is the worst noise in the entire world. The fat Midwesterners sound funny, too. One woman on my shuttle bus from the airport said, as we passed the Paris Resort, complete with Eiffel Tower and Gard de Nord, "My, isn't Paris breathtaking? I can't wait to see it." I didn't let on that the real Paris is in texas.

Vegas, I soon learned, as I wandered around looking for something to do that didn't require cash (answer: watching people lose cash), offers ATMs that take credit cards and don't require a pin. In other words, it's not your money. It's buying money on credit. It's a mechanical loan shark. I did not use this. I had visions of borrowing 50 bucks and winning so much money that I could finance my whole weekend on it, but I tend to lose money when I gamble, so that didn't happen. But, like I said, there are free drinks.

The low point of the trip - and not such a bad low point, considering where I was - came the next morning at 10:00. After 4 restful hours of sleeping, something in my head told me to watch Game 2 of the Sox-Yankees series. But it was blacked out. So I went to the sports betting room. I had pictured an attractive sportsbar where I could watch tv, order breakfast, and sit in a comfy booth. Instead it was a harshly lit cave with plastic chairs in front of rows of TVs. The game was blacked out, so I had to listen to it on a the radio amidst the rows of people cheering field goals in 22-6 football games.

On Sunday, the unthinkable almost happened. Owing to strong winds coming over the mountains, we were delayed leaving and almost missed our connection. Being stuck in Vegas on a Sunday afternoon would be a terrible thing: after 36 hours, getting out was all I wanted to do. But I'll always have Paris.