The Good, the Bad and the Ugly ... Vegas in mid-August

In no particular order ...

Silverton

Good The casino expansion, the look, it’s remarkably smoke-light given it’s a locals/bluehair joint.

Bad: Paytables -- 9/5 DDB in a locals joint? How about a few exposed and unused electrical outlets. Folks travel these days with a few implements. Slow wi-fi.

Ugly: Flipping a MUCH needed hotel expansion into timeshare. A small CRT in any hotel not otherwise located along some backroad in the Texas panhandle?

Mirage Buffet

Good: Meat carvery. (Some products hold well, like meat. Spuds and eggs and what not? No, simply no.)

Bad: Bad, simply bad. Breakfast. Fresh fruit was the standard array of cantaloupe, watermelon, honeydew, plus gelatinous pineapple. Nothing wrong with the first three, per se, but it’s berry season, and McCarran connects to the world instantly. Effort, show some. Oh, my, do not miss the capp from the machine. Life-altering. Omelet station – chewy, funky spinach.

Mirage

Good: For a standard room the rooms are well-appointed with nice furnishings, large bathroom with no skanky tub/shower/slimy curtain thing going on, huge double vanity. And a great value, too. Wi-fi blazed. (I was on it daily researching and writing, so a must for me.) LOVE the access ease of the north valet/bell desk and self-park, zip right on off Spring Mountain and the 15; one of the best setups in town.

Ugly: I have no clue what Mirage is trying to be in its public spaces. Too much black plastic draping “updates,” mothballed machines all over, dark, not sure they'll ever get past those claustrophobic ceilings.

Grimaldi’s – Venetian

Bad: Salad swimming in balsamic dressing, soggy-center pizza.

Friends

Good: Make that excellent. Thanks, y’all.

Trade Show

Good: Hey, I made some money. And nice to reconnect with peeps in the golf industry, make new acquaintances. Keep an eye on Wilson Golf, the irons have been sleepers for a while and they make a great game-improvement driver, and 2016 has some outstanding stuff in the offing: better-player driver, new irons. The Shield is back, I hope.

Ugly: A demo event, at Cascata, starting at 2 in the afternoon … in August.

Yardbird

Bad: Dinner snafu switched me to lunch the next day. It’s Yardbird, so I had the chicken/biscuit/spicy watermelon plate. From the two pieces I received, the “chicken” was a sparrow and we slay it at home with our fried chicken, biscuit nothing to crow about, the watermelon was awesome. Glad I paid lunch instead of dinner pricing.

Golf

Good: Cascata, Southern Highlands and Primm Lakes, in that order. Every time I play Cascata – about a three or four year spacing between rounds – it just resonates more fully. The trend of Primm away from its former MGM Resorts days is very apparent in the fit/finish/treatments of the clubhouse and the margins of the course, the Shadow Lite features that in the day were Shadow Lite. But it’s also not some multi-hundred/casino-bigwig place, and it would beat a lot of public tracks across the country, and the management program appears on track. Another good good good was my friend/neighbor going bug-eyed with the Cascata experience; he’s just not played any golf at that level of service and savvy.

Ugly: My third-day meltdown on the back nine at Southern Highlands. Sorry, this no-longer-desert-dwelling boy is no longer amused by 110. (Shh, VBJ, don’t say anything about the el lateral on 18 at Cascata when sitting 97 out for my third.)

Table 34

Good: Circumstances and in-the-field adjustment muddled some of the food plans, but not here. Another excellent. I’ve been eating here sporadically since the days when it was known as Wild Sage Café. I’m not a big fan of food shots from the table but I chucked up a few on Facebook the other night. Nice look, easy airs, service and food always right there. I know CK has had several bad experiences there; it’s just never missed for us.

B&B Burgers and Beers

Good: That burger was spiritually righteous.

Bad: For a joint that touts itself as beer-savvy, I felt it rather commonplace.

Ugly: The price of that burger. Holy shit.

Craftsteak

Good: It always is. Props to the wine steward (is he truly somm-certified?) for not blinking an eye when I walked in with three bottles of Pinot and we needed three glasses each for six guys. Service is timely, perfect, seamless, unobtrusive. And I just like the room and the vibe. Thanks as always to my degen buds/hosts.

Peppermill

Bad and Ugly: Who woulda thunk when ordering corned beef at Peppermill it would be the canned dog-food looking/smelling variety, and not corned beef? Horrid. I ate the eggs and toast, slurped several cups of coffee while reading the LA Times, tipped my very nice, attentive server 25 percent and told the exec chef – who for some reason was manning the register -- that I’m looking forward to Spaghetti Os on Italian night. I shoulda known from my “Hollandaise” experience there years ago. I get the big portions and I’ve had some decent eats there, but obviously I need to be done swearing off this place and just swear off it.

Egg and I/Egg Works

Good: Mary’s Hash House is no more, so for a locals breakfast fix, this is one of the good ones.

Gambling

Good: I played about 90 minutes of extremely short-pay DDB and came out $300 ahead.

Venetian/Palazzo

Good: We’ll never set up one home base in Vegas, but I can see us putting this into the rotation when we are there. We’ve stayed a few times in the past, the way ago past when it was just Venetian or Venetian/Venezia. I just like the look, feel, vibe, diversity. Sure, like any joint it has its dee-oosh-bagistas; that’s modern Vegas and it is worse elsewhere. Just a lot of ways to do what you want on that property, however. I can see a Summerlin/Venetian duet on our next trip.

Ventura

Good: Driving home, catching that first glimpse of the ocean in Ventura … priceless. For the first time in six days I was able to kill the A/C with which I’d been living 24/7 except out on the course, open the sunroof and revel in heading back to the central coast. It smelled of euc, chaparral and sea, which is something I guess we take for granted until locked inside artificially chilled boxes for days.

Home

It is the best place in the world to be.

Thanks for the great TR!

Trip Report

Good: Fun format - thanks!

Thanks Ken for the great TR with your great impressions on your experiences!

And I just shake my head NO at holding a Golf demonstration at 2PM on an August day which is pretty normally quite cruel temperature wise in LV! That's just crazy (and cruel)!

RecVPPlayer

I'm a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to TRs. I mean, I love to read and obviously I write for a living -- or maybe that's not so obvious -- but I'm just not wired to write or slug through another's every-second-accounted-for trip review. OK, there are a few folks with such lilting prose that I think I'm nearly reading Bryson or Cahill. So maybe since gambling is such a minor part of our Vegas excursions I just avoid the gambling tomes? Hmmm, is that it? Anyway, hence my down-sweet-and-dirty highlights approach.

The golf trade show has been an August fixture since before I was doing this gig, so it is what it is. It's really not that bad, you're out beating some balls, you grab a bottle of water, you retreat to the EZ-Up and chat with the company rep, you bludgeon a few more balls. I actually was surprised how well I re-acclimated to desert golf after four years ago saying adios to smoggy hot So Cal and so much time spent in the Coachella Valley. Well, except for that second nine at Highlands on Sunday. I'll be looking at the Pacific from bluff-top in Bandon, Oregon in the near future so that will be a reward of a change, and eventually I'll wend through other OR and WA golf before getting to Coeur d'Alene. Please please put out the fires for the good people of central Washington and then make the temp 75 with a 5 mph breeze for me, thank you very much.

"That burger was spiritually righteous."

Fun and nicely readable TR, Ken. Good to hear from you. I'm still here, one of the few.

P.S. Hubby and I think of you while watching golf...on TV. We find it relaxing, though Chambers Bay had us yelling at the screen, like "One grandstand, and people can't walk the course?" And "Really...a major on a course with such crappy greenery (or brownery)?" Having suffered some evil, bitchin' attacks of vertigo myself, my hero was Jason Day for hanging in there the last round? I could feel his...spinning.

Thanks, Candy. With the dearth of content here -- not an indictment of the participants -- and the Excrement Toss that is the FFA, there's no real value in hanging around here much anymore, though I do like to flip in thoughts on trips now that we're back in the swing, and of course some golf chatter when I can.

Brown is OK in golf. What wasn't good was losing control of the poa in the greens that weren't rebuilt, and then trying to cut and roll them at Open speeds. As for the foot traffic, that was a given from the day Chambers got the call. It's a fundamentally solid, even awesome golf course. But it's a walking course not a spectator course. They'll make some tweaks before the next show but it's never going to be user friendly.