Viva Las Vegas

Just got home from Vegas... It was even more awesome this time than the first time I was there...

I told the Mrs. after the first time I was there that I would only change two things in a return trip to Vegas... First, in my first trip, I stayed at the Rio, which is several blocks off the Strip... Because of the second thing I would change, walking from the Rio to the Strip was not very pleasant...which left the option of riding a shuttle provided by the hotel... Lots of people utilized this shuttle, and the return trip to the hotel, in particular, was absolutely barbaric... Too many people for the number of seats on the bus, and it resulted into a near-stampede to get on the bus... If someone had fallen, they’d have gotten trampled... It was ridiculous... So I told the Mrs., next time I go to Vegas, I’m staying on the Strip...

Second, I was there in August... The highs while I was there were consistently 109 degrees... I don’t give a damn that it was a dry heat... 109 degrees is freakin’ hot... There was a breeze blowing that, from our hotel room window, looked like a pleasantly cooling breeze...but as we learned when we stepped outside, it was a 109-degree breeze...much like how I’d envision it would be standing in a blast furnace... So I told the Mrs., next time I go to Vegas, it’s going to be in the spring or the autumn... Definitely not in the summer...

So we stayed at the MGM Grand Hotel, on the Strip, in March... Much better, on both accounts...

We had quite an unpleasant experience with Northwest Airlines, now a part of Delta Airlines, both in the planning stages of our trip and in the flight out to Las Vegas... But that’s another story for another day...

We finally made it to Sin City, and as we walked out of the airport, I found myself cringing in anticipation of a 109-degree sandblasting... Instead, we were greeted by crystal clear blue skies, 75 degrees, and a cool breeze... We waited in a very long line, albeit one that moved extremely quickly, for a taxi, took the $15 ride to the hotel, and checked in... Our room wasn’t ready yet, so we had to kill some time for a few hours... The Mrs. obviously noticed the drool coming from my mouth as I stared longingly into the casino, so she gave the okay, and I was off the Video Poker heaven...

And on my fourth hand, I was dealt four aces... Two hundred bucks...dropped into my lap...with no effort on my part... It was like hitting a home run on the fourth pitch you saw... Unbelievable...

A brief glimpse into the past: the last time I was in Vegas, I took a hellacious beating in the casino for two days, but on Day Three, I was absolutely untouchable... As one of my coworkers who was there can attest, my winning percentage (and totals) on Day Three boggled the mind and defied the odds... I recovered my two days’ worth of losses AND paid for my expenses of the trip with my Day Three winnings...

So when I was dealt four aces on my fourth hand of Video Poker in my return trip, I had visions of paying off the house, putting away enough for college educations for both of my kids at private universities, and buying a little ocean-front cottage for me and the Mrs. somewhere tropical by the time I was done relieving Las Vegas of its money...

As anyone who has ever gambled can probably guess, though, that’s not how the rest of my day went...

If being dealt four aces so early in the day was like hitting a home run on the fourth pitch of the game, the rest of my day was like handing the bat to the opposing team and telling them to take their aggressions out on me...

I could barely even get the occasional pair of Jacks required to break even... Most of the time, all five cards were numbers, possibly one face card, seldom more than two of the same suit... And any attempts to cobble together a straight or a flush were futile... Three-of-a-kind? HA! Keep dreaming, chump! It was brutal... I was thoroughly demoralized by the end of the day...

The Mrs., on the other hand, enjoyed success at the roulette table, thanks to being recently introduced to the game by a coworker... On almost every spin of the ball, she won... When she finally left the roulette dealer in a sobbing heap of defeat, she’d try out various slot machines, often hitting paydirt there, too... Meanwhile, my bludgeoning continued on the Video Poker machines... My brain said that the Mrs. was countering my losses, but the rest of me was damn jealous of her good fortune...

The next day, we decided to walk up and down the Strip and check out the other hotels and casinos... So we headed north on the Strip, starting at the MGM Grand, which is located at the south end of Las Vegas Boulevard...

We stopped at the M&M store... Four stories of M&M’s and M&M merchandise... I’m a bit of an M&M freak, so it was a pretty cool place... Looks like they offered tours, too, but we passed on that due to time constraints... And as tempted as I was to get some M&M’s in all kinds of colors you can’t find in the stores, I wasn’t willing to pay the $13.00/pound price for those colors that taste just the same as the bag of M&M’s I can get at the grocery store for 79 cents... But it was fun to walk through, just the same, so I’d recommend checking it out...

Next door to the M&M store was a Coca-Cola store that we did not visit... I’ve been through the Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta, where Coke was founded, so going through the store in Las Vegas seemed a little anti-climactic, and the Mrs. wasn’t interested, either...

Next stop was the Miracle Mile Shops... That place was COOL!! They painted the ceiling to look like the sky, and the shops were all kinds of neat architecture, so you felt like you were in some exotic outdoor market at dusk... They had a thunderstorm, complete with rain, in part of the mall, and as we ate lunch at a restaurant with overpriced, run-of-the-mill cheeseburgers, we watched a fountain right next to us synchronize with some music to give us a brief but entertaining show... Don’t waste your money at Cheeseburger Las Vegas, though...

On we went, focusing our time and efforts on casinos... Instead of doing a pub crawl, we did a casino crawl, playing a few games in several of the casinos on the Strip...

We skipped the casino at Planet Hollywood, and started instead at Paris, complete with a replica Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe (with, strangely, a Transformer guarding the Arc)... We really liked the layout of the casino there... It flowed well, and it didn’t seem congested... Paris is part of the Harrah’s family of casinos... Apparently, so is the riverboat in Metropolis, Illinois, where the Mrs. and I went nine years ago, because when we went to sign up for a gaming card, they said we had already gotten one in Metropolis nearly a decade ago... They reissued our cards, and we promptly hit the machines...and my losing streak continued... The Mrs. tried their roulette tables, found a chatty dealer that she enjoyed, won a couple of spins, played with house money for a little while, and eventually left with what she started with... Our first impression of Paris was a good one, and it’s tops on our list of potential places to stay on our next trip to Vegas...

The next stop was the Flamingo... I’m guessing it’s one of the older casinos on the strip because it had an old, stale, outdated feel to it... It seemed dirty and cheap... The Mrs. reports that they use cheap toilet paper in the bathrooms... She also didn’t like the predominantly pink lighting... We gambled there briefly, and then quickly continued our journey...

Harrah’s wasn’t too bad, but it wasn’t anything special... The Mrs. liked the purple theme a lot better than the pink theme at the Flamingo... We couldn’t find any nickel Video Poker games (which we had stepped down to after the bath I took on the quarter Video Poker machines at the MGM the day before), but we found a multi-hand poker game that was kind of fun... Harrah’s has a Toby Keith “I Love This Bar”-themed bar (I like Toby Keith and that song), but it didn’t look like much more than a small bar with a bunch of Toby Keith crap nailed to the walls... I didn’t even hear any Toby Keith music coming from it as we walked past...

We crossed Las Vegas Boulevard and went to Treasure Island... That casino was very kind to us... We left there with more money than we walked in with... They had several really cool custom choppers throughout their casino... The Mrs. thought the casino was too dark, with too many browns and earth tones... I guess I didn’t notice because I was finally starting to win a few hands at Video Poker... On the flight home, we sat next to some people who had stayed at Treasure Island, and they said the rooms were recently renovated and were very nice...

Continuing south on the Strip, our next stop was the Mirage... We walked through the whole place and couldn’t find any nickel Video Poker, so we moved on without gambling there...

We were starting to get pretty tired at this point, so we skipped Caesar’s Palace and stopped at the Bellagio just long enough to watch their famous fountains, synchronized to music... They were just as cool to see as they were in August when I was there... We were pretty pooped, though, so we skipped the casinos at the Bellagio and Monte Carlo and went back to our room to prepare for our evening entertainment...

We ate dinner at the Rainforest Cafe in the MGM Grand... For $25 a plate, I expected a lot more than the annoying hostess, crappy service, chewy ribs full of gristle, ridiculous special effects during their “thunderstorm” (basically it was like someone flicking the lights on and off while they played thunder over the PA system), and shameless peddling of their merchandise that we experienced... Avoid that place like the plague... It sucked big time...

After dinner, we saw the Cirque du Soleil Ka show in our hotel... It was really good... I highly recommend it... Just don’t pay full price for the tickets... You can get them through MGM Grand’s website for 25% off... You’re still paying through the nose, but it’s a great show... We were so close to the stage that we had arrows flying over our heads and actors standing a couple feet away from us as part of the show... It was a really impressive performance with great special effects, especially for live theater...

After the show, we hit the casino in the MGM Grand for a little while, and we actually made about $80 on Video Poker and a couple slot machines...which, at the end of the night, we immediately lost on roulette and a particularly greedy slot machine... We went to bed kicking ourselves for not quitting while we were ahead... The Mrs. was also cursing her coworker for introducing her to the pestilence that is roulette...

The next morning, the Mrs. got an earlier start than I did, so she went back down to the roulette tables to win her money back... She came back to the room shortly thereafter, absolutely fuming, and wishing things upon the testicles of her coworker that made me hurt just thinking about it... It was the last time the Mrs. played roulette while we were there...

Once she calmed down a bit, we ventured across the street to New York, New York where we gambled very briefly in their cacophony of a casino... On top of the loud music and loud machine noises, some guy sounding like a radio station D.J. at promotional event was constantly on the PA system, trying to sucker people into some sort of slots tournament... I don’t remember much more about their casino, other than the fact that it was unbelievably annoying...

We crossed Tropicana Avenue and checked out Excalibur... I liked the medieval theme but, like the Flamingo, the Excalibur seemed old, tired, and cheap... The men’s room I utilized was absolutely filthy... It stunk, the trash was overflowing, the urinals were dirty, and even the sinks were dirty... I’ve been in cleaner restrooms in gas stations on interstates... We gambled for awhile--it took a fairly decent amount of time to lose our allotted $10 for that casino--and then moved on to the Luxor...

The Luxor is a giant pyramid, complete with a Sphinx guarding the front... Their casino ranked up there with that of Paris as my favorite casino... As the Mrs. pointed out, the blue theme was soothing and somehow made losing all your money seem okay... I don’t know if they just turned the volume of the machines and the music down, or what, but it was quite pleasant in their casino... They had a large bank of new nickel Video Poker machines, which we spent a large amount of time on, as we didn’t seem to hemorrhage money as fast as we had been at all the other casinos (with the exception of Treasure Island)...

After a couple hours at the Luxor, we walked over to Mandalay Bay... We wanted to see their live shark exhibit but were disappointed to discover that there was a substantial charge per person to see it...and at that point in the trip, both fatigue-wise and money-wise, we decided to save the sharks for another visit... We ate a quick lunch there, then wandered their large jumbled casino in search of nickel Video Poker machines... We were unsuccessful in our search... They apparently wanted us to gamble more than we were willing to lose...

As we walked back to our hotel, we went past the Tropicana but didn’t go inside... The building looked old and kind of run-down, so we assumed the interior would be the same...

Back at the MGM Grand, we stopped at the live lion exhibit and were pleased to find that the lions were finally out... According to one of the signs at the exhibit, lions sleep 18-20 hours a day, and several previous passes by the exhibit had been fruitless...so we were excited to finally see the big cats...

Gambling that night at the MGM Grand was good... Twenty dollars lasted both of us all night long... It’s hard to find a night’s worth of entertainment for twenty bucks, so we were happy...

On our final morning, we had a couple of hours between breakfast and check-out, and because I was finally able to shed the bad joo-joo that had plagued me the first two days, I was able to gamble that entire time without losing a dime... It was getting close to time to catch a ride to the airport when I got a full house on Video Poker that resulted in me breaking exactly even for the morning... I thought that was a good way to end this visit to Vegas, so I cashed out for the final time... And as we rode to the airport, the wind and rain moved in, so we felt like we had timed our trip well to fully enjoy the spring weather in the desert, while escaping the pending storm...

After going through security, I was gathering up my shoes and other belongings when I heard someone say, “How about those Ohio State Buckeyes, huh???” I looked up to find one of the TSA agents gleefully pointing at my Michigan Wolverines t-shirt and reminding me that the Buckeyes have won the past five meetings in football... I came back with a feeble “Just wait ‘til November!” that neither of us really believed, but I thought it was pretty funny to be trading barbs about a Big Ten football rivalry with an airport security guy in Las Vegas... I love sports!

We had an uneventful flight home and will now, no doubt, spend the next few days trying to adjust back to Eastern time after the three-hour difference of Pacific time in Vegas...

The Mrs. enjoyed her first trip to Sin City, and we both want to go back... Everything is outrageously expensive there--except for alcohol, which is free while you’re gambling (other than the dollar or two in tips for each drink that you give your waitress if you hope to see her again with any degree of regularity for the rest of the night)--but if you know that going in, and you know you’re going to lose your ass in the casinos, you can just go there and take it all in...in its unique, grandiose, decadent splendor...

Viva Las Vegas...