A Rambling Trip Report

Off to Harrah’s Cherokee Casino from Columbus, Georgia, one way 270 miles. First, filling up the tank for Angela and Steve’s truck. Ouch! We no longer have a car, so this was my first experience with the gas-price shock.

Down the road a couple of hours, looking for a quick lunch at Subway. Brad and I get bored with the “fine dining” at our senior home; we crave fast food! First one where we stopped was closed. Subways never close in the middle of the day! Must be another sign of the times; can’t get dependable help. Fortunately, there was another one just a few miles down the road that was open.

Long line at hotel check-in. I looked over at the short Seven Stars line. Just a momentary twinge of … well … memories. Those VIP perks gave us many many years of exciting casino adventures. But now I’m learning to appreciate a more relaxed and peaceful lifestyle.

The helpful check-in clerk made the extra effort to find us adjoining rooms. They were in the Creek Tower, where we’d stayed many times in the past. They had a microwave, something I didn’t remember being there before, and a couch with a pull-out bed. We’d stayed in other towers with newly furnished rooms before and often found them too minimalistic, with not enough comfortable seating.

As I reported from our last trip here in October, the food situation was still challenging, due to the severe employee-shortage problem. Fortunately, we didn’t have to go out and look for options locally in the community. Paying real money for food outside while comps went to waste inside would have hurt my frugal soul! ☹

We were able to hit the food court on Thursday evening. Not all outlets there were open, but the lines at others moved fairly quickly. We enjoyed sandwiches and salads and our favorite soup, broccoli & cheddar, at Earl of Sandwich. However, wait lines there were impossible on Friday and Saturday. We’d made advance reservations for Selu Garden Grille and Brio Tuscan Grill on Open Table for Friday and Saturday, but we saw that walk-up patrons early in the day could get reservations for later that same day. Departure Sunday morning, we love the breakfast sandwiches at Starbucks, but always plan for a bit of a wait.

Did we win? Well, not exactly, but we left feeling like happy winners. For the first six or so hours of play, I got deeper and deeper in a depressing hole while playing through $90,000 coin-in, holding one, or two, or even three deuces and never catching the fourth. Brad played a little during that time, but got tired and  just wanted to watch, so he was there part of the time to share my groans. However, just when we were resigning ourselves to a “bad trip,” suddenly a no-skill-needed hand popped up, four beautiful deuces! I was so happy Brad was there beside me and we could share our joy, just as we’d done for 38 years. That $5,000 jackpot didn’t quite get us out of the hole and we didn’t have good luck as I played the last $10,000 coin-in to maximize our bonuses. But when you go home just $1,000 down, you’re happy for the jackpot that kept you from being $6,000 down. That’s what I call being a happy loser.

We gamblers are funny people, aren’t we? Or maybe we’re just acting human!

We did have one temporarily scary half-hour on this trip. Angela was “watching” Brad taking a nap in the adjoining room. We don’t know exactly when he woke up, saw that I wasn’t in the room, remembered that I’d gone to the casino, and decided to join me. Long-term memory was kicking in. Never mind that he had on lounging pants, but they were flannel, so he wasn’t cold and really didn’t see the need to put on proper slacks; nobody dresses up to go to a casino anymore, he always said. He did remember to put on his shoes. Then he must have quietly navigated his walker/wheelchair out of the room, so he wouldn’t wake up Angela, who had fallen asleep watching TV.

This Cherokee property is humongous and the multi-towered 21-story hotel and sprawling casino floor are in two buildings connected by a long arched indoor walkway. Our room was on the 15^th floor. So, to get to the casino, Brad would have to find the elevator down the hall, push the button for the 2^nd floor, wind through the halls past shops, navigate the long sloping walkway, enter the next building, and make his way down to the ground casino level. About a 10-minute brisk walk. Then, of course, he would have had to find me.

We alerted security and everyone was looking for an elderly man with a head full of curly gray-white hair, wearing a red long-sleeved T-shirt and gray lounge pants. We really weren’t very worried – okay, maybe a bit when he hadn’t been spotted for a half-hour. He’s very frail and can’t walk far without resting. But if he’d fallen, plenty of people everywhere would have reported that.

However, if you do get lost, a casino is a good place to do it, with cameras everywhere. So that was the next step – to check the tapes and follow him from the time he left the room and got on the elevator. We were instructed to stay near the escalator that went down to the casino floor, but Steve decided to head back in the direction of the walkway. A couple of minutes later, he returned to us, pushing a tired but smiling Brad in his walker/wheelchair.

We’ll never know what all happened on Brad’s long trek. He’d walked this route so many times down through the years when his mind was sharp, but his memory now is not good at all. I guess the map was still in his brain; he was heading to just the right place to get down to the casino. I pressed him for some details. Did he ask someone for help or did he find benches or soft chairs where he could rest? But he finds it difficult to find words these days. All he said was, “It wasn’t easy.”