Packing up and leaving is sometimes hard to do. Saying goodbyes with promises and hopefulness is even more difficult, but as the green and pleasant land disappears below the clouds our sights are set on the country we haven’t set foot on for a very long time, even though, at one time in our lives, we practically lived there. The USA was near to becoming home twenty-odd years ago, but after 9/11 we’ve been back just once. And we’re heading for the city of glitz, glamour and lost fortunes, Las Vegas. Not that we’re gamblers or in need of a bit of the high life, no, we’re sitting on a Jumbo Jet with our son who’s up front on the flight deck flying us there!

Last year we had that plan, too, but we were bumped off the flight at the last minute and came home the quick way. This time, we have our ultimate sights set on San Diego, California, and our cruise ship that will deliver us home all the way across the Pacific.

Love it or hate it, Las Vegas is here to stay! Since we were here almost twenty years ago, this 2.5 million-population city with its 252,000 hotel rooms and an additional daily capacity for five hundred thousand more people has grown in everything but class and culture.  As we drove from the airport, our son made the obvious, but rarely-uttered sobering comment that all of it has grown up and been built on other people’s misfortune – the shiny, flash-looking skyscraper hotels, the stretched limos, flashing billboards and fake palm trees – are all converted from pension funds, life savings and the hard-earned cash of punters who can’t resist the lure of gambling.

The more I saw, the more amazed was I at the sight of what appeared to be very modestly-off-looking people sitting at roulette wheels, slot machines and blackjack tables, throwing their money away. Never on my journey through the casinos (for there is no way to reach your room or a theatre or a restaurant without running the gauntlet) did I see anyone win anything.

And still they came – day after day, queuing patiently as for check-in at an airport, into the biggest Hotel in the U.S. With 5,043 guest rooms in towers overlooking the city’s famed strip – where we occupied just one – the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino is not your typical hotel. Even in Las Vegas, where hotels with 3,000 or more rooms are a feature of the landscape, the size of the MGM Grand hasn’t been surpassed since its opening in 1993.

We walked our socks off thinking ‘just one more block’. But a city block, like everything else in Las Vegas, is huge. Thinking it’s just a mere two blocks to walk, easily ramps up to one mile! The place was teeming with people – queues for taxis, queues for tickets, queues for restaurants – queues for everything! There were scantily-dressed girls on hen-holidays, beer-bottle-carrying guys on stag nights, and every style of dress (or undress) imaginable. There is no class (did I expect there to be?) yet the first-rate live shows are truly spectacular, world record breaking, mind-blowing, and only in Las Vegas. Or, ‘Lost Wages’ as it has been known to be pronounced.

I’d done my homework and research before we left home, looking for a show we’d all enjoy. So having to decide from a final shortlist between master illusionist, David Copperfield’s disappearing acts (he who made the Statue of Liberty and the Great Wall of China disappear), to picking one out of six Cirque du Soleil shows, we went to the theatre at the $1,000-dollar-a-night Bellagios Hotel to see ‘O’. Once again – only in Las Vegas! For the indoor theatre ‘stage’ was, indeed, a real lake. A lake that defies description, save to say that it’s as spectacular and inventive a live show as you’ll find anywhere in the world.

An attempt to write an unbelievable report would prove futile. But we sat in awe for two or more hours watching high-wire diving acts, underwater antics and death-defying feats of trapeze artistes flipping out over the audience then splashing from dizzy heights in between sharp, close edges of an ever-changing solid stage that came and went into the depths, as if by magic. Olympic gold winning divers couldn’t hold a candle to these performers. Of course, lighting, music, props, costumes and indeed, the whole story was just too amazing for words.

The next day we had to say goodbye to our son – he was flying back to London, we were driving to California. So as our shiny black limo streaked towards San Diego parallel to Route 66, through desert storms and Joshua trees, we stopped, parched, at what had been bill-posted about fifty miles back, as ‘Peggy Sue’s World Famous 50’s Diner’ for a well-earned spot of lunch and a sit down.

Struggling past crowds that appeared from nowhere in the desert like a mirage, we reached a reception desk and were given a buzzer with number 44. The place looked run-down and dirty, and, as Peter put it ‘….run by the rudest bunch of cowpokes this side of the high chaparral…’. When we asked how long we had to wait, we were told in no uncertain terms that the numbers meant nothing were not in any order, and would we go and stand over there.

We walked right in, and we walked right out! As the song goes, and eked out our last half bottle of water until we got to California. Of course, the traffic got thicker, and suddenly, the ten-lane highway was at a standstill both ways. By now, it was getting tedious, hot, and tiring, and so we scanned the outer suburbs of LA to find somewhere to get a bite to eat. Fifty miles later we reluctantly pulled into a golden arches and wolfed down a burger. So it really had come to that! And that set the tone for what was to come – as we had already been reminded that most ‘restaurant’ food in this part of the USA is fast, large-portioned, and totally unappetizing junk. (Apologies to those US friends of ours –but you’d agree, we know!)

Yet after only a few wrong turns off the freeway we found our way miraculously to our Bayfront hotel in San Diego where we have been for the past four days. And we have relaxed and had fun in between sightseeing trips and catching up with long lost friends whom we hadn’t seen for twenty years.

But tomorrow we leave behind the shores of California, the paper plates, the cardboard cups and creamer milk, the sticks-for-teaspoons to stir the tasteless coffee. Well, we have found they mostly take perfectly good ingredients and somehow manage to ruin them during the preparation. And we say hello to elegant living on board our cruise ship, real tea, fine dining with small edible portions, and courteousness. To cocktails on deck at six, and piano recitals in the lounge.  To NOT having to show ‘photo ID’ for everything you buy in a shop or for entry into museums or to get back the iPad we left in the care of the hotel manager when we went out to the zoo this morning!

And to crazy security where you need a card to get you into the hotel, into the lift, into the room, and practically into the bath. Oh, and not forgetting the 18 percent minimum tips in restaurants, and the added tax you pay for everything on top of what the price says on the shelf! Ah! The wonderful US of A!

Yet just a stroll away from our hotel, and we hope that by this time tomorrow we’ll be sipping champagne as we slide out of San Diego harbour and across the Pacific to Hawaii…Aloha!