What Happens in Vegas Goes on ToddSwank.com

 

What Happens in Vegas Goes on ToddSwank.com

Todd Swank's Diary Entry for September 14, 2026

Miss Sheri and I spent Labor Day weekend in Las Vegas, where The Venetian comped our room because apparently I’ve proven I’m bad enough at gambling to be considered a valued customer. I continued proving them right, but fortunately Vegas has plenty to do besides handing casinos your money. So we spent three days eating too much, seeing ridiculous shows, wandering Sin City and pretending we still had the energy of people half our age.

We love Cirque du Soleil, but somehow we’d never seen KÀ. Within minutes, our brains were scrambled. The theater looks like someone gave a billionaire a blank check and said, “Build a place where gravity can go screw itself.” Massive stages flew in and out of view, tilted nearly vertical, and became battlefields for performers climbing, flipping and dropping into what looked like a bottomless abyss. We kept looking at each other like, “How in the hell are they doing this?” And somehow, it got even crazier from there…

Then came something called the Wheel of Death, which feels like a pretty honest name for what you’re looking at. It’s basically a giant hamster wheel built by people who thought the original hamster wheel needed more ways to die. Performers ran inside the cages, climbed on the outside and kept pushing the whole contraption faster. I just kept wondering which one of these guys saw this thing for the first time and said, “Yeah, I’ll run on the outside of that.”

The next day we were off to see The Wizard of Oz at Sphere, although staying at The Venetian made it pretty hard to forget. Their lobby had so much Oz stuff everywhere that I half expected Miss Sheri to click her heels, chase me down the yellow brick road and yell, “Pick up the pace, Tin Man. We’re off to see the Wizard.”

Sphere somehow takes a movie from 1939 and makes it feel like it was designed for 2026. The film has been reworked with AI and visual effects to fill Sphere’s enormous 160,000-square-foot, 16K screen, with sound coming from more than 167,000 speakers surrounding the audience. More than 3.6 million people have already made the trip to Oz, and after seeing it ourselves, I completely understand why.  We really enjoyed the whole experience, but the tornado scene was absolutely insane. It wasn’t just the movie swallowing your entire field of vision. Wind machines started blasting, smoke rolled through the theater, fake leaves went flying past us, and simulated lightning and thunder crashed all around the room. For a few minutes, it stopped feeling like we were watching Dorothy’s nightmare and started feeling like we had somehow gotten trapped inside it.

We also spent plenty of time just wandering the Strip, where apparently Las Vegas still hasn’t run out of ways to say, “Yeah, but what if we made it bigger?” Across from The Venetian, Hard Rock is building a 660-foot, 42-story hotel shaped like a giant guitar that will completely change the skyline when it opens. It already looks enormous, and they’re nowhere near done. Somewhere, a rock star is looking at that thing and thinking, “I’m gonna need a much bigger stage.”

One of my favorite things about Vegas is that everywhere you turn there’s something new to see, wander through or accidentally spend money on. It’s like taking a tour through a giant Willy Wonka factory, except the Oompa Loompas are drunk tourists in matching bachelor-party shirts and the chocolate river has a two-drink minimum.

We walked somewhere around five miles a day, which is a lot when my back starts sending strongly worded emails after mile two. Miss Sheri, meanwhile, is always ready to keep going while I’m the one whining that I’m tired, sore, or about to pass out from the desert heat. She’s a great travel partner because somehow none of that seems to discourage her from bringing me along anyway.

We made a special effort to catch the Bellagio fountains at night, because no matter how many times you see them, they’re still pretty damn impressive. Somehow somebody looked at the middle of the Mojave Desert and thought, “You know what would really tie this place together? A 22-million-gallon lake with fountains shooting water 460 feet into the air.” Completely ridiculous. Totally unnecessary. And I’m very glad they did it.

One of the strangest things we did was ride through Elon Musk’s Vegas Loop, basically a network of Teslas driving through tunnels bored underneath the city. Las Vegas is the first real proving ground for the idea, and right now it’s still pretty limited, but the approved plan eventually calls for about 68 miles of tunnels and more than 100 stations around the Strip and downtown. I thought the whole thing was incredibly cool, although the tiny tunnel definitely triggered my claustrophobia. Our driver didn’t help when he casually explained that if the car ever got stuck, the tunnel is too narrow to open the doors—but not to worry, because he had a tool to smash the windshield so we could crawl out. Thanks. I was feeling much better before you explained the escape plan.

And since this was Sin City, we figured our last night needed at least a little actual sin. We saw Atomic Saloon Show at The Venetian, an adults-only Wild West circus staged inside a real saloon where the performers are basically right on top of you. It’s only about 200 seats, which makes the whole thing feel wonderfully unhinged. The show was raunchy, sexy, funny and dangerous enough that every few minutes I found myself thinking, “There’s no way that’s part of the plan.” We absolutely loved it.