Vegas bound. Any ideas?

My buddies there right now soaking up that bottomless happy hour at the Strat.
I wish I was in vegas.

 

quick trip report after spending a night this week at Luxor.

my brother was in for the Interop IT convention (also was EMC World this week for the gearheads out there) and i hopped over from LA. improved convention business this week meant no chance at a free room in THEhotel pour moi, as the conventions were at Mandalay Bay, so i opted for the Luxor where my bro was staying. And, as i'd never stayed at the Luxor, i thought why not. (FYI, convention business must have been good because Bellagio and Wynn were asking something like 400 a night for a Tuesday).

flight in and taxi over no problem -- based on my last couple trips, vegas seems to have cleaned up the long-haul airport ripoff of going to the strip via tunnel and I-15 instead of, say tropicana and make the turn onto the strip. check-in is quick and there seems to be a fair bit of activity in the hotel and casino, with a number of folks taking pictures of themselves by the fountains and hieroglyphics right inside the front door. check-in also nets a coupon book for stuff here at Luxor and at the neighboring Excalibur: 2-4-1 beers, free shots, you know the drill.

i wanted to stay in an upper floor so i could experience the Luxor's sideways wonka-vators, but none of the rooms there were ready and i felt like checking in, so 5th floor it was, overlooking the looking and casino as the Luxor main building is, after all, an atrium like all those 1990s Hyatts. even though it overlooked the lobby, room was pleasant and quiet for whatever little sleep i ended up getting, and was certainly serviceable albeit at $134 for the night.

ventured through the casino en route to checking out Excalibur (connected walkway). Excalibur had some $10 blackjack tables with decent rules (ie, BJ pays 3-2) and a couple no-limit games going on in its poker room. i noticed that both it and Luxor now offer 24-hour all you can eat buffet (that is, come back as often as you want for one price) to compete with the Harrahs buffet deal of one price for 24 hour access to all Harrahs buffets.

At Luxor, the poker room had just a single 1-2 no-limit game going on (50-300 buyin), and something called "The Bruce Buffer High Stakes Poker Zone," which turned out to just be a sign leading you to a gift shop. Hmm? The Luxor steakhouse had reasonable prices for California cabs ($50 for BV Tapestry, as an example, and $220 for Opus), but i couldn't get over the number of people on line for Criss Angel's show. Maybe the half-price coupons handed out 100 yards away had something to do with that.

Settled in at Luxor to play pai gow just to kill time, and my brother joined after his day was done. taught him and we played for about four hours before heading to Rick Moonen's seafood place at Mandalay Bay. Shellfish sampler to startt, then diver scallops for me with a great mole and grilled halibut for my brother. Nice.

Said goodnight to bro after dinner and sat down to play some $5 Wheel of Fortune in Luxor. For those who care, MGM's new players club is called M Life, and mirrors Harrahs Total Rewards: accumulate points and comp yourself. However, M Life will only credit you 1 point for $10 spent on machines like WoF, or Wizard of Oz, or anything licensed, whereas Total Rewards give you 2 points per $10. And to just refer back to our earlier comping discussions, the M Life brochure says $50/hand at BJ for three hours equals $10 in comp dollars (i'm an english major, so someone else can do the $50 x (x) x (y) = $10 equation).

didn't get to the Absinthe show i've heard so much about, but headed back next saturday for three days and looking forward to that and cirque's 'elvis.'

(ps: mccarran security took my toothpaste out of my luggage - more than 3.4 ounce container. America much safer now.)

 

Great report.

You got a steal on BJ. It usually costs me dinner, a few drinks and a compliment.

 

Ha-ha-ha-HA-ha.

HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA.

What a pig.

 

Short trip report about four days in Vegas beginning last Friday and ending Tuesday – okay, maybe not so short. Here’s the cliff notes upfront: I brag like a winner even though I’m a loser; seven hours of champagne is more fiscally prudent than gambling; elvis is schizophrenic; four days in vegas requires three days recovery.

Friday: Some cabbies are still trying the freeway/tunnel swindle from the airport. Staying at Bellagio so I’d never take the freeway, but cabbie twice asked me, “Freeway’s what you want, right?” and, “I’ll just take the freeway.”

No, you won’t. You’ll take Tropicana or Paradise or Harmon or whatever, but you will NOT take the freeway. For the amount of money I’m going to spend during my time here (thinly veiled brag) the extra 15-20 bucks he could make by long-hauling me through the tunnel/freeway shouldn’t matter, but jeez it pisses me off.

Bellagio check-in is a breeze; maybe there are other hotels that post someone to walk you to an open position at the desk, but I can’t remember them. Get upstairs, my pal and I unpack, and by 3 pm we are feeding the machines – which we continue to do for some 12 more hours. Unfortunately, we win precisely zero; if I were more literary minded I might call this foreshadowing. Instead, I am still hung over three days back in Los Angeles, so I’m just giving the ending away.

(There are all these bonus slot machines now, where you play 7000 lines at a time with 43 coins per line – I’m old fashioned. I like double diamond machines; three reels go round, something lines up on the center line, and you win or lose, but at least you know what you’re rooting for. My buddy has played all these other machines though, where five reels with five lines go round and you bet the national debt of Greece in hopes of triggering some kind of bonus event when certain symbols line up a certain way – like this Dean Martin machine – here’s a link:

Finally, somewhere around 4 am, we choose sleep.

Saturday: breakfast at the coffee shop. Like Harrah’s, MGM Mirage now rates players by rank – only gold or platinum member may cut the line to the café, which by the way is pretty f’ing long. The sign does, however, say ‘Invited players and MLife gold and platinum guests,’ and while we are not yet gold or platinum we are after all invited players (thinly veiled brag the second). So into breakfast it is, and dive right into the bloody marys. We are joined finally by the two remaining guests in our party, a father and his recently turned 21-year-old son who is in Vegas for the first time. Dad, for some reason has checked a bag for his Toronto-Dulles-Vegas trip, and so naturally has lost his luggage. But since both have been up since 2 am travelling and are finally here, who cares and drinks it is.

Pool time for the afternoon, followed by dinner at Todd English’s PUB at Aria, and then ‘Viva Elvis’ by Cirque du Soleil. I gotta say, I really wanted to enjoy this show more. Faced with several artistic choices, it seems Cirque couldn’t make up its mind. Strangely, this show needed more of both Cirque spectacular stuff AND more of Elvis himself. There were three great sequences, but the show ends strangely. I’ll get more detailed if anyone cares.

Anyway, more gambling ensues in which my pal and I finally hit a jackpot on this machine

(not-at-all veiled brag number three). Of course we must parlay our winnings, and of course we do no such thing. Four a.m. or so, and bed.

Sunday: Breakfast at the café again, where I now breeze past the line because I’m a gold member (brag number four). We follow breakfast with a six-hour shift at the Petrossian bar, because we all want to drink and no one wants to fight for chairs at the pool. Our bill is prodigious for this but we are happy to pay because it is cheaper than gambling (brag? douchebag comment? you decide.) and from here we shower and head to Prime for dinner. Which is … wow. Just…wow. I have always loved this joint.

Next is the Chandelier Bar at The Cosmopolitan, which is nowhere near as crowded as I expect it to be, but which is the new Vegas home for enterprising young saleswomen. Some sales are, um, consummated, while some of us head to a different bar in the hotel, before heading back to our rooms at the B and crashing face-first into the mattress – at least I did.

Monday: Pain. Lots of it. You know how sometimes you can help your hangover by just starting drinking again? This wasn’t one of those times. But, soldier that I am, I head over to Aria and then Monte Carlo, because I am tired of the withholding machines that populate Bellagio. Useless effort. I even head to Planet Hollywood where there are a couple machines that have been very good to me. Sure enough, one of these machines pays well, but only as I wind down the amount of money I’ve already got in the machine, so that I’m never ahead. This requires a lie-down, which I take for a couple hours before heading back to the coffee shop for my first food of the day at 10 pm – a surprisingly good chicken noodle soup. Yet even here I am a loser, for as I stride to the head of the coffee shop line with my now-platinum MLife card in hand, there is no coffee shop line and so there is no one I can cut off (no brag, just definite douchebag comment).

Tuesday: GTFO of Vegas.

Wednesday, Thursday: recover.

Friday: get a call from the slot host of Planet Hollywood, who wants to know when I’m coming back. I start to ask her what she can do for me this weekend, already envisioning a pretty sick Memorial Day weekend extravaganza, but then slap myself in the face and say to her, “I’ll let you know when I’m coming back.”
Instead, I’m headed out soon to watch the Bs and Bolts in Game 7.

 

I won't use the quote function but god damn Ma, I'm impressed.*

I gotta assume a 6-hour stay at Petrossian (my second-favorite bar in Vegas) must have set you back about, oh, I dunno, a Rolex?



*and terribly jealous since it's been 5 years since I regularly covered Vegas's hottest hotspots on an unlimited expense account.

 

The last time I was in Vegas, I stayed at Aria and the hotel's car took the tunnel/Freeway route. Thought was interesting since there was no meter to run up and it took about twice as long as going the other way.

 

TV: petrossian was expensive even with salmon but without caviar. Think used AirKing. what's your favorite Vegas bar?

 

What hotel has the best value? I'll need three nights in July. Any ideas?

Edit: Oh, I'll be going by myself, staying over after a work trip.

Edit No. 2: Having an iPod dock or something in there to play some jams while hanging out would be pretty cool.

 

Honestly, I had a blast at New York, New York on my first trip out there but it was a bit expensive compared to others. I think the location makes it worth it though. Right in the middle of everything.

If you're looking for cheaper places, try the Luxor. It's a bit down the strip but the rooms are fairly inexpensive. As long as you don't mind the occasional wet floor on the way to your room (Seems the housekeepers never clean the hallways) and the angled ceiling, it's a good place to go.

I just did a quick search for you on Priceline and for a random weekend in July (Don't know your dates so I just picked the middle of the month), Excalibur was running $64 per night but that place is a shit hole, the Vegas Hilton was running $70 a night, Luxor was running $79 per night and Bally's was $80 per night. Seems like a good time to get a room out there. I don't remember their prices ever being this cheap in the middle of summer.

If I wasn't Vegas'd out from my honeymoon there last year, I might be tempted to go.

 

Try the Monte Carlo. Good location, nice place, one of the cheaper resorts on the strip.

 

do you have to stay on the strip? what is it you're looking for when you say 'value?'