Sunday, March 13, 2016
When my husband wakes up, I share my new plan. He agrees. Our original plan for today was to move to Main Street, then catch the bus to the Orleans, Gold Coast and Palms. We love the Orleans, and we usually spend two days there also, but with this being such a short trip we decided it was best to stay downtown. But we are going to make it a day trip.
We play at the El Co a while longer. Again, no deuces, and there are still no seats at the progressive. The people there are the same I saw last night. They look awful. Eventually 2 people give up and go home. We take the seat. The royal is now over $3400! I have never seen a quarter royal that high. But again we have no luck. We have to check out at noon and move, but we make a quick trip down to the Golden Nugget to try the deuces. Still no twos, but the royal on that machine is $1800. But no luck. Very close to the deuces is the game Barnyard Poker, which is on videopoker.com. I have played that sometimes, but the goal is to blow up sheep, goats and pigs as multipliers. Which is disturbing. But we play the game and it is a lot of fun. We try it, and actually win a little. We then race down to the El Co to check out and move to MSS. Try the royal one more time, no luck. I know it will be hit when we come back.
We check into MSS, and I call Hugo’s to make a reservation. The reservation line is not open until 2:00. If we are going to have dinner there we are going to have to change our plan for the day. We originally were going to go to Eastside Cannery on Monday, but we change that to today. There is an Express Bus that goes to the Eastside Cannery, but since it is Sunday, it doesn’t run that much. I see that we have about 10 minutes to make it, so we dash out of MSS and head to the bus. Along the way we pass the California, and I see the Sam’s Town shuttle is there, so we grab that instead. Since it drops us off at Sam’s Town we play there and then walk to the Cannery. We have not really eaten all day, so we eat at their coffee shop, Snap’s. It is better than we thought it would be, and very inexpensive.
We have come to the Cannery to play a game we discovered there two years ago, called Aces and Deuces. It pays a bonus on the quad aces and deuces, and also on other quads with an ace or two as a kicker. This game is designed for me. Last year we both did really well on it, but not this year. My husband signed up for the slot club, and because of that he got to spin for free play. He actually won $25 in free play. So we played a bit, then decided to head back downtown, since we weren’t hitting anything. While we are waiting for the bus I call Hugo’s. They have no reservations! What?!? So I am pouting and he suggests we take the 202 bus, which is sitting there, to the Gold Coast, and do our Orleans, Palms, Gold Coast trip tonight. Ok. So we take the 202. I had forgotten there was construction on Flamingo near the Strip. All I can say was I was grateful it was a Sunday and traffic was light, because it took a while to get there. And we had to stop and pick up the passengers on the bus ahead of us because a car hit that bus! But no one was hurt, just a fender bender, so we were on our way. We arrived at the Gold Coast at 4:00. We played a bit, redeemed our free play and lost our first match play on table games from the LVA book. It was now 5:00, and we were going to go to the Orleans and come back to eat at the Palms, so we could use our LVA $50 coupon. But we were both a bit hungry, so we thought we could eat, then go to the Orleans, which would be a lot easier trip. We were going to go to Lao Sze Chuan. We ate there last year. It was good, but not a place we really wanted to come back to. But there are not a lot of choices on the coupon this year. However, the steakhouse N9NE was also included. But it is very expensive, even with the coupon. Still, I was willing to eat at Hugo’s, so we checked out the menu. They had a prix fixe menu for $68. It sounded better than the regular menu. So I asked the hostess if we could use the coupon on that. She went to ask the manager, and he said we could. So we went and played a bit, and came back.
The food was amazing, and the deal was fantastic. On the prix fixe menu we got onion soup and the garbage salad, then a “surprise” from the chef – a small cup of corn chowder. We could choose from salmon, chicken, or steak. I had steak, my husband had the salmon. The entrees came with potatoes and asparagus. Two glasses of wine were included, but they were not the best, so we only had one. Then for dessert was sorbet and chocolate cake. We were stuffed! It took about 1 ½ hours to eat, but the whole bill came to $78, plus tip. It was fantastic! Made me feel better about missing out on Hugo’s. We played some more, and lost our two match plays. We were kind of tired. We decided if we went to the Orleans we might not enjoy it. So we would go back downtown and go to the Orleans first thing in the morning. We decided to take a cab back because the trip back up the Strip from the Flamingo area can be a long wait sometimes. I was never so scared in a cab ever. He had to be driving 90 miles an hour, weaving in and out of traffic. It was horrible. But it was the cheapest ride ever because it was fast! We played more in the Main Street, where I order a Queen of Hearts. As I’m enjoying that, my husband is dealt three Queens. He notices which one he’s missing, and asks to see my drink. Instead of sampling it, he puts it down on the screen and hits Draw. Sure enough, right under the glass, the Queen of Hearts pops up for a 4 of a kind, one of the few he’s had this trip. We play a little more, but there is nothing else good. Off to sleep.
Monday, March 15, 2016
Now, I have not mentioned it, but since we are gone, we are having our 17 year old stay with a family friend. He has things to do during the day, but he is to spend the night at her house. His plan is to get up, come home to shower and get ready, then go to his internship. When we booked this trip in January, I had asked my friend to take him to school if the weather is bad, and she is fine with that. But since it has been 60 degrees in Ohio in March, there is little chance of bad weather. But I have instructed my son to take school clothes to her place, just in case. So I am finally sleeping in Vegas when my phone rings at 3:00 am! It is the recorded school message informing me school has been delayed for two hours. Why? So I pull up the school closings page from Toledo on my phone and everyone is on a 2 hour delay for fog. Fog, I didn’t plan for that! So I call and text my son, no response. He finally wakes up and calls me. He says the fog is really bad, he doesn’t feel comfortable driving in it. No problem, my friend will take him to the internship, which luckily is 2 blocks from her work. He can wear the clothes he brought. Except he didn’t bring them. So he has to drive home and get ready, and she picks him up at home. She tells me the fog was already gone when she picked him up, but really bad while he drove home. So from 3:00 am to 5:30 I was awake. After he gets there safely I finally sleep another 45 mins. So we are up at 6:30. Last day, got to get started.
Since we are going to the Orleans, we get ready, and enjoy our coffee at the bar. This is another one of my favorite things to do. I didn’t do too well, but my husband was starting to get quads, so he was doing better. Except he now doesn’t have HIS slot cards! He checks at lost and found, no luck. So back to the booth he goes. I can’t believe we both lost all our cards! We then head over to Dupars for breakfast. He is going to celebrate Pie Day (peach!) and I have a shrimp cocktail. I love eating in Vegas! We catch the SDX down to Tropicana, then hop on the Tropicana bus, and we are at the Orleans in 50 minutes. Yeah, lots of time to play.
We play all our favorites, such as Dream Card, and also get our free play and match plays. For the first time this trip, I win a match play. Yeah! We find another version of Dreamcard, which is single line. I play this and get the 4 aces and 4 fours. I cash out my winnings, and we play some more. We ate lunch at the new Asian restaurant, Ondori. My husband liked his dish, and although my bento box is fine, it is not exciting. We thought the old place was better. We finish up and take our bus back downtown. As we get off the bus we talk to our son, who had a wonderful day at his internship. We make one last trip through the El Co. No big deuces wins. The royal is gone, of course. We wonder how high it got before someone hit it.
We go back through the Golden Nugget and try the progressive again, no luck. My husband hit over $150 on Barnyard Poker. It is fun, but why do you have to explode cute animals? Then we play the match play in Golden Gate and the Plaza. These are the $25 ones, and we win both of those. That is a nice boost. Then we head back to MSS and play some more at the bar (I have a Lady Luck, and my husband tries out the drink app and finds a Bonehead), Treasure Chest and Pay the Aces. My husband is really getting the quads now, but I am not doing well at all. We try one last time at the Golden Nugget, and say our good byes to Fremont Street and the progressive. The rest of the night is spent at MSS. We had dinner at the 777 Brew Pub. It was fine, but again not the best. My husband gets three more treasure chests. I get none. There is only one other trip that I never got a chest. Oh well. I did find a fun slot machine called A Christmas Story. Usually I don't like video slots, as I never can figure out what symbols to root for. But this one was fun, and I actually got to the bonus round three times. I only saw it at El Cortez and MSS. I hope to play it again, sometime. We do get to the casino in Cleveland, and since the movie was filmed there, my husband thinks they might have it. I hope so!
We can’t keep our eyes open, and it is almost midnight. We have to get up at 5:15 to get ready, as the flight is at 8:30. We take a relaxing cab trip to the airport, breeze through security, grab some food for the plane, and finally begin to play. I always hold some hope out for the airport, since I hit a royal there one year. But I continue to lose. It’s time to head for home. The trip home was uneventful, and we made it home in time to attend a school meeting.
Not the best trip, but certainly not the worst. Thanks to the royal early on, we brought home most of our gambling budget, even though we did end up losing overall. And as always we had a fantastic time.
Next year our son will be away at college, so we hope to come out for a longer trip, maybe even a week. Maybe one time I will finally sleep well in Vegas.
Thanks for reading!
When my husband wakes up, I share my new plan. He agrees. Our original plan for today was to move to Main Street, then catch the bus to the Orleans, Gold Coast and Palms. We love the Orleans, and we usually spend two days there also, but with this being such a short trip we decided it was best to stay downtown. But we are going to make it a day trip.
We play at the El Co a while longer. Again, no deuces, and there are still no seats at the progressive. The people there are the same I saw last night. They look awful. Eventually 2 people give up and go home. We take the seat. The royal is now over $3400! I have never seen a quarter royal that high. But again we have no luck. We have to check out at noon and move, but we make a quick trip down to the Golden Nugget to try the deuces. Still no twos, but the royal on that machine is $1800. But no luck. Very close to the deuces is the game Barnyard Poker, which is on videopoker.com. I have played that sometimes, but the goal is to blow up sheep, goats and pigs as multipliers. Which is disturbing. But we play the game and it is a lot of fun. We try it, and actually win a little. We then race down to the El Co to check out and move to MSS. Try the royal one more time, no luck. I know it will be hit when we come back.
We check into MSS, and I call Hugo’s to make a reservation. The reservation line is not open until 2:00. If we are going to have dinner there we are going to have to change our plan for the day. We originally were going to go to Eastside Cannery on Monday, but we change that to today. There is an Express Bus that goes to the Eastside Cannery, but since it is Sunday, it doesn’t run that much. I see that we have about 10 minutes to make it, so we dash out of MSS and head to the bus. Along the way we pass the California, and I see the Sam’s Town shuttle is there, so we grab that instead. Since it drops us off at Sam’s Town we play there and then walk to the Cannery. We have not really eaten all day, so we eat at their coffee shop, Snap’s. It is better than we thought it would be, and very inexpensive.
We have come to the Cannery to play a game we discovered there two years ago, called Aces and Deuces. It pays a bonus on the quad aces and deuces, and also on other quads with an ace or two as a kicker. This game is designed for me. Last year we both did really well on it, but not this year. My husband signed up for the slot club, and because of that he got to spin for free play. He actually won $25 in free play. So we played a bit, then decided to head back downtown, since we weren’t hitting anything. While we are waiting for the bus I call Hugo’s. They have no reservations! What?!? So I am pouting and he suggests we take the 202 bus, which is sitting there, to the Gold Coast, and do our Orleans, Palms, Gold Coast trip tonight. Ok. So we take the 202. I had forgotten there was construction on Flamingo near the Strip. All I can say was I was grateful it was a Sunday and traffic was light, because it took a while to get there. And we had to stop and pick up the passengers on the bus ahead of us because a car hit that bus! But no one was hurt, just a fender bender, so we were on our way. We arrived at the Gold Coast at 4:00. We played a bit, redeemed our free play and lost our first match play on table games from the LVA book. It was now 5:00, and we were going to go to the Orleans and come back to eat at the Palms, so we could use our LVA $50 coupon. But we were both a bit hungry, so we thought we could eat, then go to the Orleans, which would be a lot easier trip. We were going to go to Lao Sze Chuan. We ate there last year. It was good, but not a place we really wanted to come back to. But there are not a lot of choices on the coupon this year. However, the steakhouse N9NE was also included. But it is very expensive, even with the coupon. Still, I was willing to eat at Hugo’s, so we checked out the menu. They had a prix fixe menu for $68. It sounded better than the regular menu. So I asked the hostess if we could use the coupon on that. She went to ask the manager, and he said we could. So we went and played a bit, and came back.
The food was amazing, and the deal was fantastic. On the prix fixe menu we got onion soup and the garbage salad, then a “surprise” from the chef – a small cup of corn chowder. We could choose from salmon, chicken, or steak. I had steak, my husband had the salmon. The entrees came with potatoes and asparagus. Two glasses of wine were included, but they were not the best, so we only had one. Then for dessert was sorbet and chocolate cake. We were stuffed! It took about 1 ½ hours to eat, but the whole bill came to $78, plus tip. It was fantastic! Made me feel better about missing out on Hugo’s. We played some more, and lost our two match plays. We were kind of tired. We decided if we went to the Orleans we might not enjoy it. So we would go back downtown and go to the Orleans first thing in the morning. We decided to take a cab back because the trip back up the Strip from the Flamingo area can be a long wait sometimes. I was never so scared in a cab ever. He had to be driving 90 miles an hour, weaving in and out of traffic. It was horrible. But it was the cheapest ride ever because it was fast! We played more in the Main Street, where I order a Queen of Hearts. As I’m enjoying that, my husband is dealt three Queens. He notices which one he’s missing, and asks to see my drink. Instead of sampling it, he puts it down on the screen and hits Draw. Sure enough, right under the glass, the Queen of Hearts pops up for a 4 of a kind, one of the few he’s had this trip. We play a little more, but there is nothing else good. Off to sleep.
Monday, March 15, 2016
Now, I have not mentioned it, but since we are gone, we are having our 17 year old stay with a family friend. He has things to do during the day, but he is to spend the night at her house. His plan is to get up, come home to shower and get ready, then go to his internship. When we booked this trip in January, I had asked my friend to take him to school if the weather is bad, and she is fine with that. But since it has been 60 degrees in Ohio in March, there is little chance of bad weather. But I have instructed my son to take school clothes to her place, just in case. So I am finally sleeping in Vegas when my phone rings at 3:00 am! It is the recorded school message informing me school has been delayed for two hours. Why? So I pull up the school closings page from Toledo on my phone and everyone is on a 2 hour delay for fog. Fog, I didn’t plan for that! So I call and text my son, no response. He finally wakes up and calls me. He says the fog is really bad, he doesn’t feel comfortable driving in it. No problem, my friend will take him to the internship, which luckily is 2 blocks from her work. He can wear the clothes he brought. Except he didn’t bring them. So he has to drive home and get ready, and she picks him up at home. She tells me the fog was already gone when she picked him up, but really bad while he drove home. So from 3:00 am to 5:30 I was awake. After he gets there safely I finally sleep another 45 mins. So we are up at 6:30. Last day, got to get started.
Since we are going to the Orleans, we get ready, and enjoy our coffee at the bar. This is another one of my favorite things to do. I didn’t do too well, but my husband was starting to get quads, so he was doing better. Except he now doesn’t have HIS slot cards! He checks at lost and found, no luck. So back to the booth he goes. I can’t believe we both lost all our cards! We then head over to Dupars for breakfast. He is going to celebrate Pie Day (peach!) and I have a shrimp cocktail. I love eating in Vegas! We catch the SDX down to Tropicana, then hop on the Tropicana bus, and we are at the Orleans in 50 minutes. Yeah, lots of time to play.
We play all our favorites, such as Dream Card, and also get our free play and match plays. For the first time this trip, I win a match play. Yeah! We find another version of Dreamcard, which is single line. I play this and get the 4 aces and 4 fours. I cash out my winnings, and we play some more. We ate lunch at the new Asian restaurant, Ondori. My husband liked his dish, and although my bento box is fine, it is not exciting. We thought the old place was better. We finish up and take our bus back downtown. As we get off the bus we talk to our son, who had a wonderful day at his internship. We make one last trip through the El Co. No big deuces wins. The royal is gone, of course. We wonder how high it got before someone hit it.
We go back through the Golden Nugget and try the progressive again, no luck. My husband hit over $150 on Barnyard Poker. It is fun, but why do you have to explode cute animals? Then we play the match play in Golden Gate and the Plaza. These are the $25 ones, and we win both of those. That is a nice boost. Then we head back to MSS and play some more at the bar (I have a Lady Luck, and my husband tries out the drink app and finds a Bonehead), Treasure Chest and Pay the Aces. My husband is really getting the quads now, but I am not doing well at all. We try one last time at the Golden Nugget, and say our good byes to Fremont Street and the progressive. The rest of the night is spent at MSS. We had dinner at the 777 Brew Pub. It was fine, but again not the best. My husband gets three more treasure chests. I get none. There is only one other trip that I never got a chest. Oh well. I did find a fun slot machine called A Christmas Story. Usually I don't like video slots, as I never can figure out what symbols to root for. But this one was fun, and I actually got to the bonus round three times. I only saw it at El Cortez and MSS. I hope to play it again, sometime. We do get to the casino in Cleveland, and since the movie was filmed there, my husband thinks they might have it. I hope so!
We can’t keep our eyes open, and it is almost midnight. We have to get up at 5:15 to get ready, as the flight is at 8:30. We take a relaxing cab trip to the airport, breeze through security, grab some food for the plane, and finally begin to play. I always hold some hope out for the airport, since I hit a royal there one year. But I continue to lose. It’s time to head for home. The trip home was uneventful, and we made it home in time to attend a school meeting.
Not the best trip, but certainly not the worst. Thanks to the royal early on, we brought home most of our gambling budget, even though we did end up losing overall. And as always we had a fantastic time.
Next year our son will be away at college, so we hope to come out for a longer trip, maybe even a week. Maybe one time I will finally sleep well in Vegas.
Thanks for reading!
