What happened in Vegas (part 1)

Last day of my working vacation, which ended up with a lot more emphasis on the "working" than the "vacation," unfortunately. I have a little tan, but mostly it came from a bottle of Jergen's. Seriously, how sad it that?

I didn't take a lot of pictures. But here are a few:



That's Rus, the bartender at Kokomos at the Mirage. I arrived a couple of hours before check-in and the room wasn't ready, so I had no choice but to sit down and have a giant glass of wine. This is near the atrium at the Mirage -- it's actually a very pretty spot, with tropical flowers and waterscapes. For some reason I didn't get a picture of that, though.

I did get a picture of the funny "out of order" sign on the video poker game inset into the bar. It's a little blurry (it was a giant glass of wine): "Monitor soaked with alcohol. It was pouring out when the door was opened."

Two guys came to fix the machine while I was sitting there. I asked one of them if that happened a lot and he said "All the time."

I did make it to the Mirage pool for one brief visit before it closed. It was beautiful.





On my second day, I moved from the Mirage to Caesar's Palace, where the conference was. The cab line was very long, so I decided to walk with my two very heavy pieces of luggage (one on wheels, the other perched precariously on top of it). The two hotels are right next door to each other, about one city block apart. In between them there's an entrance to a shopping mall, which is part of Caesar's. It was hot and the sidewalk was kind of bumpy, so I decided to go to the hotel via the indoor mall, with its air conditioning and its smooth floors.

Twenty minutes later I was still walking.

Thirty minutes later I started to cry.

What I didn't realize was that the indoor mall twists and turns and basically goes all over Robin Hood's barn before eventually leading back to the hotel casino, then you still have to go through the casino to get to the registration desk. It was a really excellent way to start the day, walking the length of three or four football fields, dragging my luggage behind me.

Luckily, Eddy the bellman spotted me coming and rushed over to whisk my bags away and point me toward the conference halls. If he hadn't of been so damn nice to me, I'm pretty sure I would have had a total meltdown.

(Later in the week I went for a walk just to see how far out of my way I'd gone. It was maybe 50 yards from the entrance of the mall to the front doors of Caesar's Palace. Would have taken me about three minutes.)

I didn't get to check into my room until much later in the day (that whole "working" thing again), and maybe it's just because I was so tired at this point, but that damn room made me so happy. Very swank. Bigger than my living room at home. With a huge king size bed, a sofa, a chair and ottoman, a little table with two chairs, a huge flat screen television (and another smaller one in the bathroom) and a beautiful view of the pool, the mountains, and the strip.

Here's one more shot of the view ... I haven't uploaded the rest of the pics yet but the sun has come out and I am going to take advantage of it ...



To be continued ...