On the way back from a fine dinner at the Bay City Diner (good food, better service, plus the $2.99 shrimp cocktail), a few off-the-cuff observations were made. A) Damn few people Downtown, even for midweek. B) The Plaza may have reopened its Aqua Pit restaurant. (People were observed dining there, at least.) This merits further investigation. C) The Golden Nugget spent $150 million on its Rush Tower and, judging by the outside, $149.9 million of that was for the interior. The Rush Tower exterior is the hotel equivalent of a brown paper bag, breaching new frontiers of visual ennui.* D) The guys who serve the (scrumptious) frozen bananas at Mermaids are mighty tough-looking hombres. You wouldn’t want to rankle them, methinks. No visit to Downtown is complete without a look-in at Mermaids, although the frozen bananas are a sometime thing: It took me three visits to finally obtain this Vegas delicacy.
* — They must serve a mighty weak cuppa joe at the Golden Nugget’s Starbucks. Of three people on its veranda, one was fast asleep and two others looked to be on their way to the Land of Nod.
On the way home, we very, very nearly accidentally T-boned a U-Haul truck at Sahara Avenue and the Strip. Seems that the truck’s occupants, a moronic trio of gentlemen, had a pressing desire to park their rig at the World’s Largest Gift Shop. This occasioned an unsignaled right-hand turn from the far-left lane, clear across the southbound breadth of Las Vegas Boulevard. Only a miracle — and our driver’s quick reflexes — prevented a near-certain multi-car pileup. The irony is that the U-Haulers deranged, improvisatory maneuver was only slightly more reckless than is the norm on Vegas Valley roadways.
Pennsylvania = same s**t, different day: I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve read a headline like this. Gov. Ed Rendell‘s impatience is wholly understandable, given the snail’s pace at which state House and Senate conferees have proceeded. If there are clear winners amongst the casinos, it’ll be the small “resort” ones. They got a sweetheart provision, in the form of a 20% slot machine increase. Ah, politics as usual.
Wait until Ohio makes Pa. seem downright speedy.
I stayed Downtown at the Golden Nugget last month in the bargain Carson Tower. The room was well kept, a great value and the long walks to my room just gave me psychic permission to eat and drink more. One thing I like about Downtown is that a rental car is much less necessary. It was great to be an easy walk from an ABC store — great for reasonably priced necessary items like canned soda and macadamia nuts.
The near future is going to be rough downtown. I dearly hope somebody does something creative with the Plaza, Binions and/or the Vegas Club — not to mention the terrible eyesore once called the Lady Luck. On the positive side I thought Main Street Station, the GN, El Cortez and the Fremont looked great and seemed busy.