Ugh, I started working on this yesterday and somehow managed not to save what I had done. My apologies if laziness and irritation compel me to write less well than usual.
My friend Logan, his roommate Joe, and a regular from our poker game named Darren had been planning to fly out to Vegas for a few days during March Madness to bet on the basketball games and play some poker. Although I don’t follow basketball, I elected to come along anyway, as I’ve been wanting to get in some experience with live poker and I’ve never been to Vegas with just a group of my buddies.
On short notice, I managed to get a round trip, direct flights both ways, from Boston to Vegas for $300 from Jet Blue. I’d never flown with them before but was looking forward to the free satellite TV as a welcome diversion during the 6+ hour flight, especially since I don’t have cable at home. Very luckily for me, the Discovery Channel was running a Man Versus Wild marathon. Man Versus Wild drops a former British special forces member named Bear into a different hazardous wilderness each week with just a knife and a flint. He demonstrates how to navigate your way back to civilization, avoid the unique hazards of the region, and find food and water.
I spent three hours watching him escape from a dense South American rainforest, the most active volcano in the world, and one of the highest peaks in the Sierra Nevadas, the last of which involved him virtually butt sliding down several thousand feet of steep rocky cliff face and eating a live snake. It’s great entertainment.
The flight was fine, despite some turbulence, but once we landed we had to wait about twenty minutes on the tarmac for another plane to leave our gate. Then it was twenty more minutes for the bags to come off the carousel, then nearly an hour in line to get a cab.
Thankfully, my driver was worth waiting for. Seeing him yawn, I asked what time he got off, and he told me, “1:30, but that depends on who my last fare is. I’m not done until he is. One time I took this guy out to the Bunny Ranch at midnight. It takes an hour to get there, and he didn’t come out until 7:30 AM. My cut of the meter was $300, and he gave me a $250 tip.”
“Wow, just imagine what he spent inside.”
“The best part is that he called me up a few months later to ask if I could come get him from the airport. We went straight out to the ranch, and this time he invited me to come in with him. He paid for everything, and I was still on the meter! Frankly, I sort of felt like a whore myself, since I was basically getting paid to screw.” It seemed a little sleezy to me that he would keep the meter running when the guy was paying for his prostitute, but I didn’t say anything.
When I got in, Joe and Logan came to meet me in the lobby of the Venetian, where they’d been playing poker all day. “We’ve already played enough to cover our poker rate for the whole weekend,” Logan told me. For those who don’t know, the Venetian offers a discount on their suites if you play six hours per day in their poker room. So we got an amazing suite for the four of us for three nights for about $150 a piece.
I hadn’t eaten much since breakfast, and they were hungry, too, so we hit up the Venetian’s all night Grand Lux Cafe. The service was a little slow, but the prices were very reasonable, the portions were large, and my mozzarella and tomato salad was delicious. They also have all night breakfast, which is very exciting, even though I wasn’t in the mood for it at that moment.
Darren didn’t get in until the next morning, so between the two beds and the pull-out sofa there was no need for sharing. We turned in around 2:30 AM, and rather annoyingly there was a little light near the two stairs that separated the ‘rooms’ of our suite that would not turn off. When I got up in the middle of the night, I couldn’t see it and thought it had eventually gone out, but then I tripped over the pillow that Logan had cleverly stuffed in front of it.
This was really the only drawback to what was otherwise an outstanding room. It was spacious, very tastefully decorated, comfortable, and functional, with an amazing bathroom. The main room of the bathroom was monstrous, containing a full vanity, a spacious shower, an oversized tub, and a double-sink. The toilet was in its own antechamber.
My favorite thing about the bathroom was that the shower had two little jets on either side of the faucet that would spray water onto your torso while the shower head soaked you from above. It just helped to keep your body a little bit warmer and wetter during the shower. All in all, a fantastic room, and as I said, with the poker rate, we got it for a great price.