TR-Vegas Death March
So we went to Vegas for 6 nights at Thanksgiving with my goal of hitting all the Strip casinos (25 of them) and buying 5($1) casino chips, playing at every casino, and having a beer at everyone of them. In my world this seemed like a worthy endevour. We stayed at Venetian, which we won't do again (more on that later), at a Rialto Suite. We splurged this time after passing up a bunch of comped nights at Bally's, where we've stayed a dozen times or so.
We did the death march in order starting at Encore, picking up one day where we left off, and finished it up on day 4 at TI. Day 3 was the biggie, we took the monorail down to MGM, hit Trop, Mand.Bay, Luxor, Excal., NYNY, Monte Carlo, Aria, and Bellagio. We got a personalized tour from the new hotel manager at the Trop and got to check out most of their newly updated suites. We're gonna have to stay there as it's one of the few we haven't stayed at. Anyhow, I've added updated chips from all the Strip casinos to my collection. Turns out Encore and Wynn use the same chips, but Palazzo and Venetian have both available. Kuddos to my wife for enduring a blister on Death March day 3. That was a lot of walking.
Anyhow, we did most of our playing near the Venetian and I found myself spending a lot of time at Casino Royale again. We ate at Outback 4 times I think. Beer is still $1 at CR, while right next door at Venetian the same bottle of beer is $6. We went to Lagasse's Stadium to watch the Ohio State-Michigan game and while we there some guy sitting next to my wife hands her 10 drink coupons for any bar at Palazzo/Venetian, so that was the luckiest hit we had all trip.
Now for the slots: A you can imagine 7 days in Vegas gives you a chance to try everything, and I did. I hit for $80 at the airport while waiting at the baggage claim, one of the bigger hits for the trip. Wife hit $157 on Thanksgiving Day on WOZ at Harrah's of all places. I had a few minor hits here and there and after about 3 days, I had pretty much decided that spinning streak games, Zeus II, and Sex and the City were what I wanted to play. I did have a long run on Gems, Gems, Gems at CR, probably played for 90 minutes and came out $20 ahead.
We signed up at TI for a players card for the M&G and we had some luck there, but didn't play too long. TI will only sell you 3 chips at a time so I had to make 2 trips. We walked over to Ellis Island to get some Metro Pizza and I checked they had VP Jacks or Better with 9/6 paytables. It was getting dark so I only played the Reel Rich Devil spinning streak game and won almost $100, cash out and leave.
My laptop came up with a registry error that I couldn't fix so my plan of racking up miles on both the computer and slot for LOTR didn't work out as planned. Oh well.
I always like to leave on a winning note, so our last night I stopped at CR to give video poker a shot. I'm pretty good at Jacks or Better, but I tried Bonus Poker and hit four aces, holding a pair of aces over 4 on a flush on that hand. Anyhow, cashed out and went back to the room feeling good as I was leaving on a win.
I wasn't happy the next morning when we went to check out and they had come up with an upgrade fee of $56/night added to our bill. My wife had made the reservations over the phone with a promo they had sent us last summer. They gave her a price, they sent us an email confirmation with the same price, I called to verify our reservation and the total price 3 days before we left, and there was NO mention of an upgrade fee anywhere. We're Vegas veterans and we are careful about what we are doing and getting so it really pissed us off. We had to call housekeeping when we got the suite because it hadn't been properly cleaned (porn card on the table), toilet light burned out, no remote controls. They were pretty responsive after that but it kinda set a tone, know what I mean? So we argued with the manager for about 30 minutes at check out because there was NOTHING in our info about this charge. He finally gave a credit for most of the upgrade fee because of the issues we had with our room. We had a great stay at the Palazzo last April, but this may have killed it for us. It wasn't so much the money as the principle of the thing.
Anyhow, here's some pics from the trip.
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Nice pics!!
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