Day 2: We have seen a greater proportion of Vegas than we had at this point yesterday.

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Our first full, fully compos mentis day. Began with a breakfast of gargantuan proportions, naturally. I had something called biscuits which seems to be cake. Lovely enough in itself, but why the obsession with mixing sweet and savoury at that time in the morning? They don't do it later in the day - here's your steak sir, and would you like ice cream with that? Becks has pancakes with buttermilk and maple syrup and was asked if she wanted bacon with it! I don't know - it's almost as if we we're in a different country or something.

The first thing you learn about Las Vegas Gun Club is that you do not talk about Las Vegas Gun Club. Well, they don't mind you talking about it really. A pretty surreal experience. While you are choosing your ammunition (I believe they call it ammo in the trade) the assistant indicates the 10 targets displayed on the wall looming over the reception area and blithely invites you to choose your victim. It's a little unsettling that one of the targets is Osama Bin Laden. It's probably more disturbing that 4 more of them are generic Araby looking people in a variety of threatening poses, one of them holding a poor little white girl round the neck while brandishing a weapon and scowling for the camera like the threat to America that anyone with dark skin so obviously is. There is one white guy doing the same to a twee little blond girl. So you can choose from 5 Arabs, 1 white criminal and 4 zombies! But let's not dwell on that.

Most of the patrons of the gun club were giggling Englishmen like us, trying not to show their excitement at being in close proximity to real-life guns, just like they have on the telly. The shooting itself was great. When I held that cold steel in my hand and blew Osama away, I finally felt like a real man. Something that had laid dormant inside me for too long gripped me, and I realised that I had been wasting my time fannying around with my lily-livered new-man ways and from henceforth I shall carry myself in a way that shows my innate superiority over other races, oh and women. Not really, but it was good fun.

For a country where they are supposed to frown on walking, we have done bloody LOADS of it. Walked the remainder of the Strip, went up the Stratosphere and spent a beautifully chilled hour or two both sat leaning against a viewing platform gazing at Las Vegas, largely in silence, from 830 feet up as darkness took it and the town's true garishness revealed itself.

Wandered back, blindly stumbling though casino after casino, each indistinguishable from the last and each cleverly designed to NEVER LET YOU OUT!!!! We saw nothing very circusy in Circus Circus (apart from fading decor, peeling paint and the stale stench of a once vibrant art form now reduced to desperation and dwindling numbers - that's quite circusy). We saw no Roman gladiators in Caesar's Palace. But I did get to see the Bellagio fountains so I'm happy.

This afternoon we're helicoptering (it's a word if I say its a word) to the Hoover Dam, Lake Mead and the Grand Canyon follwed by a flight up the Strip. Then on to Fremont Street.

No really, I mean it. Have a GREAT day.

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