I apologize in advance, I’ve let too much time go by since this trip, and I took no notes, so this is going to be pieced together to the best of my ability. Cast of characters: myself and my boyfriend, Mike, ages 25 and 24, respectively. We have both been to Vegas multiple times, and this was a semi-last minute trip brought on by the offer from the Aladdin for a free room Friday and Saturday night, Moody Blues tickets, cocktail reception and the coincidental occasion of my 25th birthday. Or, rather, my birthday was an excuse to take the Aladdin up on the offer!

TRAVEL
Flights were America West out of Reagan early Friday am, back into Dulles on the redeye Monday night. Both were full, but generally on time. I got to the airport at 6:30am for our flight still drunk from excessive partying that had taken place the night before, so sleeping was no problem on the plane.

Car rental was through Dollar, airport location, and I am quite proud that I rented a car ON my 25th birthday…no more underage charges! The shuttle dropped us off and the driver told us to stand under the blue tent since we’re Fastlane. There were no employees around, so finally we picked up our luggage and sought one out halfway across the parking lot. We had reserved an intermediate but had a coupon for a free upgrade. However, the attendant said he’d be “nice” and offered us the choice of several 300Ms on the lot. Of course, as soon as the words were out of his mouth, Mike was drooling at the opportunity to ride around in such a car for 3 days. Unfortunately for him, I had been eyeing a row of brand new Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredos. Upon inquiring and finding out that those were fair game as well, I called driver’s choice (he’s still not 25) and climbed in the Jeep. Not that the 300Ms don’t look cool, but the width of them was very intimidating, and I LOVE driving SUVs.

Not quite believing our good fortune and how easy the process was, we approached the exit booth only to find out that my name was asterisked to “go inside.” Arghhh. Had to back up and was terrified of finding a huge line inside. Luckily, there were no customers at the Fastlane counter and I was able to quickly correct the problem: my license had expired between registering for Fastlane and then and I hadn’t updated my profile so they were showing me as having an expired license. All I had to do was show them my new one and it was all straightened out. However, this is a good lesson for anyone who renews his/her driver’s license: make sure to update your Fastlane profile!

HOTEL
The Aladdin, Friday and Saturday free, Sunday $79. We really don’t love the Aladdin, but somehow Mike became a Gold Club member in July of last year. He had nowhere near enough points and we’re still not sure if it was a computer glitch or a benevolent slot club employee. Either way, this has gotten him some great room rates and offers, but this was by far the best we’d ever received. Check-in was a breeze, and I believe he told the check-in lady it was my birthday and she gave us a partial view of the fountains and the Strip. This place is definitely tired and seems to be going through the motions until the transition to PH is complete in 2006. However, we were of course much less critical due to the reduced rate we were paying! A major complaint about the Aladdin that we were unable to ignore was how slowww the elevators are. This is a hotel built just a few years ago, with almost 25 elevators, and we would still wait for minutes at a time or encounter completely packed elevators. Hopefully PH will fix this somehow.

This is a bit of an aside, but one thing that mystifies me: room windows in Vegas seem to be so dirty on the outside…yet I’ve never seen a window washer, and the prospect seems terrifying. Has anyone ever seen a window washer on one of the big Strip towers? How do they clean the windows?

Another benefit of the Aladdin Gold Club is that we get to use the spa for free, and we were able to take advantage of this twice. I don’t have a lot of other spas to compare the Elemis at the Aladdin to, but compared to the Paris, it is extremely nice. The Jacuzzi is great, as are the steam room and sauna. And the staff is friendly and you can take as much free juice and bottled water as you’d like…just take a big bag and be discreet! We were able to stock the room for the remainder of the trip.

DINING
OK, let’s see if I can remember our dining adventures.

Our first meal of the trip was lunch Friday and my birthday celebration meal since we had the Moody Blues concert that night. We chose to eat off the “Businessman’s Special” menu at the Palm in the Forum Shops and I still can’t get over what an amazing value this was. For $18 each, we each had some of the best iced tea I’ve ever had, Caesar salads, 8 oz. ridiculously good filet mignons and a huge plate of cottage fries and hash browns to share. This was a $36 meal that would have cost well over $100 on their regular menu! The place wasn’t very crowded, but we had the nicest and most attentive wait staff I’ve had in awhile. They were able to maintain that enjoyable banter with us yet were still completely respectful…hard to explain, but hopefully you know what I mean. Mike then had to drop in conversation that it was birthday, and they brought out a gigantic slice of key lime pie and gathered around for a mock birthday serenade. Somehow, I don’t think this is common practice to sing happy birthday at the Palm, but they were having fun, much to my blushing horror.

Dinner was after the concert at Zanzibar Café. I happen to think the food is pretty good here, but their service is consistently atrocious. We were literally flagging someone down to try and order and it just took forever. The portions are big though and my quesadilla was quite tasty, especially since I had a pretty strong buzz going on by this point in the evening.

On Saturday we were driving around anyway and decided to partake in the Texas Station lunch buffet. We had been here once before and remembered it being good, especially since we had had coupons and it had ended up costing just over $3/pp. This time around was a different story. Our ACG coupons were ineligible and they jack the prices way up on the weekends, so it ended up being like $13/pp. The food was still OK, especially the tacos, but I wish we had just eaten at FatBurger like we were going to.

For dinner Saturday evening we decided to venture to Il Fornaio at the Green Valley Ranch. We enjoy going out to GVR, and I was craving Italian food. After hemming and hawing over the restaurant section in one of our guide books, we made this selection and it was a great choice. I was able to call around 5 and make reservations at 8. Our table wasn’t quite ready so we each had a glass of wine at the bar and were invited to help ourselves to the complimentary olives they serve. We were seated on their patio, and though it essentially backs up to their parking lot, it has high walls and lots of greenery so you feel pretty secluded. The food was excellent, and we had a nice leisurely meal and decent service until our food was served. Then our waiter pulled a complete disappearing act. Never checked back with us, had someone else bus our table and left us sitting there for a good 20 minutes with NOTHING—no water, coffee, anything. Finally, he appears as if nothing had happened and gives us an aggressive sell for dessert. Uh OK, maybe 20 minutes ago buddy but not now. The check was delayed another fifteen and I was seething by this point. Finally he appeared with the bill and I made him wait for my credit card until I had checked everything over. It really was a great meal, and I’d still recommend Il Fornaio, it’s just too bad that our waiter was so incompetent.

For Sunday lunch we both really wanted some Chinese food, and Mike remembered the coffee shop at the Orleans having particularly good Chinese. His memory served him correctly, and it was fantastic. Unfortunately, the portions were just huge—we could have split a single dish and still had leftovers. But it was good and satisfied the craving.

Sunday evening we went to the Monte Carlo Brew Pub for dinner. We got there towards the end of one of the games in the NBA finals, so we had to wait though it only ended up being about 15 minutes. We split nachos for an appetizer and got a short giraffe of their wheat beer which is delicious. I got a beef-fajita wrap type thing, don’t remember what Mike had. As always food was good, plentiful and very reasonably priced.

And here ends my culinary adventures in Vegas. No, not because we left after Sunday night, but because some time around 9 or 10 that evening at a blackjack table my stomach started to hurt. At first it was that “I’ve been drinking too much, eating too decadently, not getting enough sleep” kind of hurt…but by 2am when I was in bed in the room, it turned into “violent vomiting and other issues” kind of hurt. I still don’t know if it was a 24-hour flu bug or something I ate (even if the food at MC Brew Pub was innocent, it’ll be a long time before I eat there again), but just remembering it is making me nauseous again, and I wouldn’t wish being that sick in Vegas on my worst enemy. I didn’t eat anything except a few crackers and sprite until we got home, and I just felt absolutely awful…not exactly the way I thought I’d spend my last day in Vegas. Luckily, Mike had called down to the front desk early Sunday evening before I even got sick asking for a late check-out since we were on the red eye. At first they told him to call back the next morning, but after noticing that he was a Gold Club member they transferred him to casino services who granted up a 5pm checkout. We thought this was just cool on it’s own, but it turned out to be much more of a blessing since there was no way I would’ve been able to get out of bed and gotten checked out by 11am.

GAMING
Gambling this trip did not turn out as I had hoped…as in, I lost all allotted gambling funds by the time I got on the plane Monday night. Our games are live poker and blackjack, and I just couldn’t catch a break on either. We played $2/4 hold ‘em at Monte Carlo the first night, and things were going really well at first. I was up, the people at the table were generally enjoyable and we were having a good time. The dynamic changed however when 2 kids joined us to “Kill some time before going clubbing” and didn’t know the sequence of hands for anything. The girl was particularly awful, to my right, and betted out of turn on almost every hand. By the third time, I was very harsh with her because it was ridiculous that after multiple corrections she just didn’t get it…and of course she called EVERYTHING. But as it goes in $2/4 games, those that call everything often end up catching runner runner or make their hand on the river. This happened for her several times, but then the gambling gods intervened when she played her pocket 2’s to the end and then couldn’t understand why a straight beat her. Hehehe.

Mike played in a couple of late night poker sessions, and stayed up until 6:45am on Saturday “night.” Though I exclaimed something along the lines of “You’ve got to be f***ing kidding me” when I looked at the clock and heard him stumble in, lucky for him he’d managed to make $300 on a $3/6 hold ‘em game in the Aladdin room, so he was forgiven somewhat quickly. Since I had gone to bed fairly early by Vegas standards, I was raring to go by 9:30, and he had just gone to bed. I went down to the pool for a couple of hours and enjoyed by book and the quiet in the sun…not a bad way to spend a morning.

We played blackjack at the Monte Carlo a couple of times and then at the Gold Coast a couple of times. While my money lasted for the most part, I just felt like I couldn’t get on a run during any of the sessions. It was so frustrating, and the worst gambling trip I’ve had.

I also played some bar-top blackjack at the Aladdin bar and at the Monte Carlo bar, and couldn’t catch a break from this game either. I’ve decided they must use 12-deck shoes in the machines, and that it probably isn’t a good use of my money. It used to be a great way to get free drinks, but they’ve cracked down on the minimum number of credits you have to play to get comped drinks. Some of the bartenders are cool and don’t care, but others really seem to keep an eye on it.

OTHER
The Moody Blues concert, which was part of our package at the Aladdin, took place on Friday night in the Aladdin’s theatre. As expected, we were about 20 years younger than the median age, but it was somewhat entertaining and we stayed for about half of it. Unfortunately, we just don’t know many of the songs, and after having been up since 6:30am EST I was fighting to stay awake and we were hungry. The pre-concert cocktail reception was nice though, and it was open bar, nice liquors, and then big tubs of beer to help yourself to. We were able to snag several bottles to smuggle out of the ballroom to enjoy before the concert, and got a nice buzz going.

One of the cool things we did while we were out there was drive over to the Rio and watch the World Series of Poker. It was in its beginning week, but since we watch a lot of poker on TV, it was cool to see what was essentially a football field-sized conference room filled with poker games. The sound of all the chips alone was almost deafening. They did have a final table of what I believe was a $2000 buy-in limit game being filmed for television and there were several recognizable players at the table…though names are escaping me at the moment.

Other than that, it was a very chill trip. We loved our car so much we spent a lot of time just driving around. We tried to keep it as relaxing a Vegas can be, and minus me getting so sick and not winning any money, we had a great time. Sorry this was so disjointed and so late, let me know if you have any questions.

Posted by DCtoVegas on LVTalk