SDE in the USA 2024: Day Three

SDE is in the US to see Duran Duran and Tears For Fears! (If you haven’t read Day Two, head here)

Our two days in New York were sadly over and today was what touring musicians call ‘travel days’ when they are on tour. Part two of this trip was about to begin – and, in truth, the main reason for it – going to Las Vegas to see Tears For Fears play at the FontaineBleau resort hotel!

As noted previously, there was a lot of construction going on in and around JFK and because of this some uncertainty over how long it would take to get to the airport via a cab, never mind having to pay another $85! So I finally made an effort to establish how the ‘AirTrain’ worked to JFK and it was rather straightforward in the end.

It just involved getting an local F train from Manhattan to ‘Jamaica’ in Queens. But you do a last minute switcheroo to an E train at ‘Forest Hills / 71 Av’ and get off at the ‘Sutphin Blvd – Archer Av – JFK Airport’ stop (so good they named it three times) which is where the connection to the AirTrain is (so called because it’s an elevated train, like airport shuttle services). It takes about 20 mins to get to JFK on the AirTrain (and costs $8.50). Now I know how to do it, I won’t be getting a cab from JFK ever again!

It would be the New York Marathon on the Sunday, so as we exited our hotel. the street was full of runners, presumably getting some last training in before the race proper. We later discovered there was a Las Vegas marathon on Sunday as well!

The flight was of course an internal, domestic flight (via Delta), but we had the longest queues for security at JFK today on the whole trip. It was going to take five and a half hours to get there, since Vegas is well over 2,000 miles away from New York and there would be a three hour time difference, to boot.

It was cool seeing the Manhattan Skyline (great a-ha song) from the plane as we made our way up to the cruising altitude and the Delta aircraft was quite nice in the Comfort+ cabin. The main criticism with Delta was what you might loosely call the ‘food’. For a flight of that length, and especially in the equivalent of premium economy, I was expecting something semi-decent. But there was no hot food at all and nothing cold that was in any way healthy. For the whole trip, we were being offered just nibbles: ‘chips’ (crisps), corn crunch-type snacks, gummy bears (this is a flight full of adults). Sugary, or salty, crap, basically. Rookie error, I guess, since Anne looked around and saw many people had brought their own, more healthy, snacks (sandwiches, fruit etc.).

To give them their due, the in-flight wi-fi was much cheaper than Virgin and, most importantly, actually worked, so I did a bit of work and later made use of the decent in-flight entertainment, rewatching Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia which I know very well, but it’s always a pleasure seeing Al Pacino and Robin Williams perform in that movie.

On our descent into Vegas we got great views of the Vermilion Sands (great Buggles song) of the Grand Canyon and then some of the strip.

I have been to Vegas once before, a long time ago (2000) and it’s a crazy city. The airport has fruit machines all over the place. We cabbed it to the Fontainebleau which I was pronouncing in French since that’s how it’s written, after all, but it seems most Americans call it ‘Fountain Blue’ and the cabbie gave me a slightly withering look, as if I was a schoolboy practising my French. It was a $29 flat fair from the airport which seemed okay, although we’d later discover that Uber is by far the cheapest way to get around Vegas. I later regretted not hiring a car, even though we were only going to be in town for two days, because we ended up spending a fortune on cabs. 

It’s hard to convey the scale of the Fontainebleau hotel. It’s ridiculously big. It cost $3.7 billion to develop, is 67 stories high and has 3,644 rooms. There were two shiny, brand new Aston Martins parked in one of the foyer areas (and liberally dotted around the inside of the hotel). On day four, when we left, we ‘found’ another area of the hotel that had about 15 vintage Aston Martins on display. A whole car museum, effectively, we had not come across. The hotel features its own shopping mall, 26 (count ‘em) restaurants, a conference centre, multiple bars, pools, spas and ‘wellness’ centres and of course a near 4,000 capacity theatre [the “Bleaulive Theater”] where Tears For Fears were playing! 

This was the only day of the trip where I didn’t go record shopping. I tried. An early afternoon cab to Target near MGM Grand to try, yet again, to obtain the TFF exclusives, ended with a member of staff once again telling me they “don’t do music”, with a look that said “are you mad?” This was the equivalent of a Tesco local – a shrunk down Target that only had ‘essentials’ (we can argue about how essential the new TFF album is!).

The concierge had incorrectly assured me that it was the biggest Target in town, which turned out not to be true at all. We had a walk down the strip for a while and then headed back to the hotel for something to eat. In the ‘foodcourt’ area on level 2 we saw a Tears For Fears fan contingent and went and said hello to Kyrie and her friend (main image). Many of them were going to multiple shows but we were happy to wait until Saturday to see the band play.

A quick drink in the bar and then up for some well earned shut-eye. Our body clocks were taking a bit of a battering and there was more to come tomorrow, since the clocks go back an hour in Nevada! Our third time change in four days!

Stay tuned for Day 4 on SDE, tomorrow.