Even though I have lived in Southern California for twenty years I have never been to Las Vegas. The allure of the place never quite lured me. Kind of like fishing with the wrong bait - using squid in a freshwater stream. But Rush was the right bait and that was the only excuse I needed to get hooked into Sin City during the R30 Tour.

There were some logistical problems with the trip from the moment we crossed into Nevada. Those are boring details and resolved themselves in one way or another. After driving for half the night after seeing the Phoenix show it was a relief to see the beautiful green glass that is the MGM Grand Hotel - and knowing in that about 12 short hours I was going to be in the Grand Garden Arena seeing my 7th and final show of the tour.

In my travels around the strip on foot, looking for a hotel room for the night (actually, for the DAY), being friendly with others - I began to ask the question, "Are there any stories of luck today? Has anyone gotten lucky?" I was asking this to strangers, to shuttle drivers and random people who caught my eye for one reason or another. The driver of the hotel shuttle - an older gentleman with gray hair and looked to be in his 60s, turned around from his seat with the air conditioner blasting as we bounced down Tropicana Avenue to the Belagio and New York New York, and said with a stern look, "I haven't heard of a single stroke of luck in a long, long time. Not in years. Not in this town."

While this made me reasonably uncomfortable, I took it as a standard answer. I already had a few strokes of luck this morning and planned to continue to buck the bad luck trend that everyone seemed stuck on. The driver commented that it's a real rare thing to get lucky in Vegas. But this being my first trip here I had already been lucky finding a hotel room close to the strip on the fly (only after walking into 20 places and being told everything in town was sold out for the weekend). I was determined to build on my good fortune despite what anyone else had to say. The dice were rollin' and the wheel was spinnin' and I was winning.

Arriving at the New York New York drop off, I hopped off the shuttle and walked over to the MGM in the searing desert heat. It was great seeing the advertisement for the RUSH concert up on three giant screens outdoors. The hotel was also playing Rush songs on the public address system all day long. I found that to be really amazing, actually. But how many of the slot and card players really recognized this fact? Or cared? I never did hear "Big Money" playing. That would have been highly appropriate!

Luck struck me for the second time of the day at about 5:30 p.m. That's when I scored a 7th row center ticket, row G in section B. Roll those bones baby, and for me on this tour it's been straight up 7's and black all the way with the exception of a bad hand in St. Louis. Talk about a roll. They should have given me a presidential suite for the night with complimentary cocktails and dancing girls. And I was later to learn that I got that ticket only by someone else's momentary mistake at another keyboard in the hotel - otherwise I would have been sitting in the nose bleed section. Things happen for a reason, I believe.