back
Back from Vegas…tired but it was a super fun trip. I definitely needed to get out of town, not see the same surroundings that I see from my daily computer-at-home, computer-at-work, apartment, and office building routine.
Highlights (and lowlights):
- When I went to pick up my friend, I stopped at a Wherehouse, which was going out of business. All CDs were 75% off. Although there wasn’t much left, I managed to snag 10 albums in the category of “albums I’d wanted to check out, but didn’t really want to pay $15 each for,” including a couple of Built to Spill albums, Paul Westerberg, Boards of Canada, Tanya Donnelly’s solo album, the last Trail of Dead album, and others. $45 for all 10 albums.
- I learned how fools pick music for movies - somebody basically burns like 5-10 CDs of songs. My friend ended up with these CD-Rs for a big giant movie, and we were listening to them on the way there. Kinda cool to learn how that works.
- The Palms is definitely my new favorite joint to stay at in Vegas. It’s off the Strip, but I’ve been to Vegas enough to know that pretty much after your first hour there, you just end up taking taxis everywhere because, umm, you don’t feel like driving or walking. I scored another $5 limited edition CSI chip there - this one I’m going to send to my parents, who like the show too. I ran across two $25 CSI chips while I was playing blackjack, but ended up cashing them in.
- Speaking of blackjack, I spent most of my time playing Super Fun Single Deck Blackjack, which is basically just blackjack with a few variations, like being able to double or surrender at any time. I probably should have checked out the house advantage before I left, but I wasn’t too cool with the standard games I was seeing. Also, my play isn’t perfect enough to justify deciding against a game because it might have a half a percentage point difference in favor of the house. But true to its name, it was super fun - better than getting stuck in a bad shuffle and getting worked throughout an entire six-deck shoe.
- I’m getting better at playing blackjack - learning to pick good games, better money and time management, and setting up stop/loss scenarios. Yay.
- Despite talk of a weakened economy, it looked like Vegas was in full swing on the Strip and Downtown - more like a weekend than a weekday. My friend had never been downtown before, so we quickly checked out all of the casinos. We only gambled at two. It was actually hard for me and my friend to get a table, except the Golden Gate, which was kinda dirty and full of fools like whom I’ll probably end up when I’m 40, and the Plaza, where we had to sit through newbie dealers who fumbled the cards. We only played there for about an hour, then went back to the Palms.
- Red Bull/vodka and Corona brew both glow green under ultraviolet lights (or whatever those lights are called). Also, never wear dark clothes in clubs that have this lighting - all of the dust and stuff that you can’t see in the daytime shows up under the special lights, and you look like you have Xtreme Dandruff that got all over your shirt and pants. Embarrassing.
- The Bellagio buffet still rocks, and I think it’s priced lower than the last time I was there - it was $15 for lunch and it looked like $25 for dinner. But I don’t think I can eat any kind of red meat from Vegas hotels anymore. There’s something about it - prime rib from buffets, steaks from hotel coffee shops - that just makes me feel sick and jammed up these last 2-3 trips.
- The Bellagio again - the casino’s overuse of dark browns in garish patterns for both the carpet and the awnings makes it hard for me to see clearly in that place. Yuck.
- Tried to catch the Stern broadcast at the Hard Rock, but the line was ridiculous. Oh well…maybe some time in the future.
- It only took us 3.5 hours to get to Vegas due to the new 210 freeway extension that goes all the way to I-15, but it took us SIX hours to get home. Keep in mind that this is a Thursday afternoon on a non-holiday week - it’s not like we caught the Sunday rush of fools returning home to Southern California. Traffic stopped 45 minutes out of Vegas on the I-15 to merge into one lane due to construction (took us 2 hours to get from Vegas to Baker). It also stopped again outside of Barstow, for the same reason. Meanwhile, there are miles of blocked-off lanes where absolutely no construction work is happening, and where there are construction people, there are five guys standing around, watching 1 guy work on some asphalt or something.
I’m not driving to Vegas until they’re done. It’d be well worth it to pay $60-$100 for a flight and not have to deal with inching forwards for two hours on the interstate when you were heavily drinking the day before and only got five hours of sleep.
That’s about it. Back to the real world tomorrow - but the real world is getting more exciting and fun, so this trip was a nice diversion and not a total denial-of-reality escape.