The Comedy Festival is on at Caesar’s Palace and tonight, Eddie Izzard appears at the Augustus Ballroom at 10:00 pm. Even though we are due to fly out to San Francisco tomorrow morning, we decide to make the drive down to the ‘Strip to see our favorite comedian.

(Point of fact: It’s not “even though”, it’s actually by design. We got the Izzard tickets quite some time before we realised we had to make the SF journey, and so the timing was quite deliberate, the earliest we could make the flight and still see Eddie the previous evening.)

We left the house at 8:30 pm, figuring we’d have time to maybe have a little coffee and/or dessert somewhere in the hotel. Alas, this was not to be. After we took the Flamingo exit from I-15, we found ourselves stuck with traffic inching along through clogged intersections for half an hour, making the journey to the entrance to the Caesar’s Palace self-parking garage.

Worse was to come. We spent another 30-40 minutes circling the floors of the parking garages looking for a spot. “Circling” makes it sound like we were moving at a rate somewhere on the positive side of stationary, whereas the truth was that we were moving only slightly faster than we had been a few minutes before on Las Vegas Blvd.

At about 10:00 we finally caught a glimpse of a car’s backing lights as it vacated a spot, and we took it.

Friday night in Vegas. There was a reason we never did this. Yet Mr Izzard should be worth it…I hoped. We’d seen his last show on TV and I didn’t think it was as good as his 90’s material.

We ran down the stairs of the parking building and out into a back alley way. Where was the casino? It was impossible to tell what direction we were looking it. We followed the road and eventually came to a loading zone and a security guy who said, “keep going that way, then don’t go through the doors but turn left and then right,” and actually those were pretty good instructions because we found ourselves at one of the familiar entrances to the casino floor.

Now it was 10:05 pm and we still had to find the Augustus Ballroom.

Turns out that it is up two very long flights of escalators and then down a very long corridor that must go the whole length of the convention center. At 10:10pm we thrust our tickets at the door people who gestured us through into a very large but typical convention ballroom, packed with people. We had no idea where our seats would be but an usher waved us along with several other people to a row of empty seats on a raised platform near the back – basically the best seats in the house! The show hadn’t started yet but everyone was very fired up and very ready and it was clearly only a matter of minutes.

Eddie came on and was brilliant. Definitely classic-era calibre material. It’s really hard to describe his kind of comedy. His zany, super-smart stream of consciousness is something you either love unreservedly, or go “huh.” We love it and several of his expressions have entered our permanent lexicon. (I’m less certain about Ducks and Football, about which he wouldn’t shut up.)

He was worth the kerfuffle with the car park, and the traffic. It was midnight by the time we drove into our own garage back in the North end of the Valley, and we had to be up at 7:00 to get ready for our SF trip. Tired!