Vegas, the arrival...

Vegas, days one and or two, and three. Got to say, at first, I was more than a little disappointed. Here is the list of things that happened on day one as far as I can tell…

1. It’s hot. This is a given of course for the mere fact that Vegas is in the desert.

2. Room check in took about 15 minutes, and then the woman who checked us in didn’t give very good directions as to where everything was, like, the elevators.

3. We were assigned a handicapped room, which all and of itself is not too bad of a thing, except for the fact again, that the shower tends to spray water all over the bathroom floor, since there is nothing there to keep it inside the shower area.

4, The handicapped room is closest to the elevator, which means, all day, and all night, the elevator can be heard through the wall of our room. This, I have gotten used to in just a couple of days though.

5. During our first night in-house, there was a false fire alarm. And fire alarms here for some reason tend to talk to you, in a very loud voice. The jury is still out, if you ask me, on whether or not this is a good thing, or an improvement to the normal flashing lights and loud klaxon that normally accompanies fire alarms. But if you’re in a place you’ve never been before, and it’s 4 in the morning, yeah, it’s kind of freaky.

6. Then something simple comes along. Such as, the door lock to your room doesn’t want to work too well. Allegedly, you insert your key card, and a green light flashes, and the door pops open. Those of you who have stayed in a hotel before know the drill. Here though, insert key card about 15-30 times, and THEN the door pops open. Yeah, we can still get into our room but what a pain in the arse that is.

7. The TV is fuzzy. Just about every channel on there has some sort of interference with the reception of the channel. It’s like we have bunny ears on the back of this rig or something like that. I thought cable TV was supposed to eliminate issues such as this?

Other than the above mentioned items though, it’s been a hoot thus far.

After we got through the crazy check in thing, and found our room, it was immediately to the pool and large drinks in each of our hands, which was nice. There is something to be said about large drinks and laying by the pool, normally not my bag, but this was nice. The water was of course, nice as could be expected in the pool and all. Swam a couple of laps, actually very few laps, and then we were back to the room to shower, and then to take in what is classic Vegas. A buffet dinner. The buffet was not your run of the mill Golden Corral affair as most of us in the South now all about. The good was pretty good quality, and tasty, it’s just that there was too much of it. Good desserts. Good chow. Good booze. And then we got to gamble. After observing a few hands of blackjack on the casino floor, we decided to sit down and have a shot at it. The fiancé, almost immediately, doubled her money, and then went back to the room to have some well deserved sleep after traveling all day. I decided to stay a little longer, like 3 more hours longer, and played for a good part of the night. I only ended up losing like $30 or so, at least on the first day. We won’t talk about the other days, for now.

The town is of course, as one would expect extremely cheesy, but I love cheese. The fiancé and I walked around the Forum Shops over at Caesar’s Palace yesterday for what seemed like a couple of days. Think, mall, except bigger and larger, and more excessive in everything. There were fountains every 10 feet or so with huge ass fake sculptures that sort of looked real, and then there was the loss of Atlantis show that we say. Fire, animatronics, loud stuff, explosions, and all of that stuff, and get this, yeah, it was free. Good stuff seeing the kids of Atlantis battle it out between themselves. Of course, there was an audience interaction thing going on. Vote with your voices who you think should run the town of Atlantis. At the end though, no matter if you voted for the Viking looking woman, or the metro sexual prince, they both lost, and the place was sucked back down into the fountain from whence it came. As a sort of sad side note to that. Sitting just 10 feet away from this spectacle was the best hitter baseball ever produced, Pete Rose (OK, well Ted Williams was the best hitter ever, whereas Pete Rose had the most hits ever, but you know what I mean here). Although, the line to get his autograph was huge, Rose will forever be related by his gambling problem he had. Ironic that a man who had a gambling problem is now sitting in the middle of one of the biggest casinos in the world signing autographs for money. Sure the man belongs in the Hall of Fame, but he’ll never get there. It’s too bad, that just one issue, or one problem can get a man banned from the sport he gave his entire life to, he can never again participate in. I guess you make your bed, you have to lie in it. Right?

After getting back from the Forum, we decided to take a little nap, which turned into a long nap, which turned into just staying in on Saturday night. Hey, we were tired, well, I was exhausted since I didn’t get to sleep very much or at all Friday night / Saturday morning (even on vacation insomnia rules my life I think). I slept, a lot, which of course led to more not sleeping on Sunday night, which is another story.

And here we go with some pictures that I took whilst out here. Enjoy...