What happens in Vegas...

Oh, Las Vegas.

How I adore you already.

I probably could have guessed. In typical crow fashion, I am predictably attracted to anything that glitters, and glitter you do. To put it mildly. The moment I spied the laser emitting from the pyramid at the Luxor from my window seat on the plane as we began our descent over the strip, it was pretty much love at first sight.

I enjoy how I was naive/optimistic enough to think that I would arrive at 11pm (2am Boston time) and go straight to bed. Um, no. As soon as I walked into the lobby of the MGM Grand, I became completely overwhelmed by the vast, ostentatious Las Vegas-ness of it all and was immediately re-energized. Which is how I came to be sitting in a random casino bar at 2 in the morning with my boss, drinking my third martini and watching bemusedly as a pack of drunken, middle-aged midwesterners wearing sunglasses indoors at night made a valiant but spectacularly unsuccessful attempt at seducing the cocktail waitress. Is there a better time and place in the universe to people-watch than in the wee hours of the morning in Sin City? Of course, anyone people-watching us probably thought we were a couple. Especially considering that he thinks it to be the height of hilarity to tell people I'm his girlfriend. All I can say is, if anyone were to believe him, then they'd probably also assume he was filthy, filthy rich.

An underrated part of business travel, I've discovered, is the fact that you get your own personal hotel room. Mine was extremely spacious and well-appointed, with a king sized bed and a bathroom approximately equal in square footage to my bedroom at home. And while I must say I was less than enthused about the quality of the linens - the towels were rough and the sheets were so scratchy that thread count didn't even come into the equation - I rather enjoyed having the freedom the strew my things indiscriminately around the room, turn the thermostat up as high as it would go, and frolic in my underwear. (Thank God I don't live alone - I'd spend a fortune on heat and my place would look like the shoe department at Macy's post-natural disaster. But at least I'd have really good body image.)

One thing that is overrated, however, in the realm of travel in general, is time zones. I realize that they serve their purpose. But when you've been out drinking until 2am, but your brain insists upon whirring back to life a mere 4 hours later because it thinks it's 9 and should probably be getting to work, that's not always kosher. At 6am yesterday, there I was, wide awake, and with nothing to do before my breakfast meeting. So I dressed myself in a fashionably businesslike manner, went downstairs in search of a Starbucks to provide me with a venti black eye, and proceeded to wander the premises and get stared at lasciviously by legions of questionably sober midlifers on vacation from their wives. I did not expect Las Vegas to make me feel quite so much like a circus freak. Like taking the subway times 10. I'd have thought that my turtleneck sweater and pencil skirt would be no match for cocktail waitresses with their bottoms literally hanging out of their dresses, but apparently not. Maybe it was the shoes. The low heeled, beige, vaguely orthopedic shoes the waitresses wore were no match for my crocodile (okay, faux-croc) stilettos.

By the time my breakfast meeting (and four more cups of coffee) rolled around, I was so manic that I was probably speaking at a speed comparable to the guy who used to voice-over the Micro Machines commercials. Luckily for me, I am charming when highly caffeinated. We took a tour of the whole hotel and the conference facilities, which to my well-contained glee included the Cirque du Soleil Ka theater where they filmed the CSI episode where the girl got crushed by a hydraulic piece of stage. And as soon as it was over I was ready to crawl beneath a poker table and sleep for three days straight. Seriously, that tired. But I couldn't sleep. First, I had to have lunch at Emeril's New Orleans Fish House and take a limousine to the airport and drink a 32-ounce mug of Red Hook that was a workout just to lift. Then, as is standard, I got seated next to one of the most unsettlingly bizarre men ever in the history of air travel and was unable to sleep on the plane because he kept making weird noises. By the time I got home at midnight, after enduring a cab ride in which the driver apparently mistook me for a legal analyst despite the fact that I informed him more than once that I was not a lawyer nor was I familiar with any who were not inconveniently confined to the fictional genre of hourlong crime dramas, I was ready to drop dead of exhaustion.

I love Vegas, but next time I go, it will be for longer than 31 hours, that's for damn sure!