Travel Log, Day 1 OR "Wait, Why Did I Want To Do This Again?"
I feel that I should preface this first entry with the awesome sleep schedule I started the vacation with:
FRI: 5:30AM-8:00AM(yay class!)
SAT: 9:20PM-3:45AM(one hour of which didn't actually exist)
So I kind of started out exhausted!
I will also preface this by saying many of these entries will not be terribly interesting since i'm regurgitating more than telling, but these are more intended to be used as a base for future pieces rather than to entertain on its own. Aiming to do one every day I'm away.
Anyway, I awoke and got around without too much excitement, finishing my packing and noticing I missed about a million calls and texts, but being a little too groggy to do anything about it at the moment. I turned off my computer for the first time in 2009 and stepped outside to see a day full of promise, full of energy, full of... shit, like I am with those previous statements. It was so foggy I could barely see my nose. Spectacular driving conditions, for sure.
An hour and a half later(around 6:20) we arrived at some silly parking lot where we were to be ferried over to the airport terminal. I rather dislike planes, but the bus ride managed to successfully make me forget about potentially dying on the plane, since I was damn sure I was going to die in the bus ride over. In spite of the fog, which really hadn't lifted at all and thus was like Digimon-Season-1-Myotismon caliber, and in spite of the fact judging by the cars around us the speed limit had to be around fifty, we rocketed to the airport at around 75mph. Admittedly we probably would have smoked any cars, trucks, or dinosaurs stupid enough to get in our rather colossal transport's way, but jesus fucking christ, man.
By 7 we were in line (a theme for the day) at the airport, waiting for our boarding passages and to dump our luggage. I'd thought that the boarding pass acquisition and the whole check-in-you-best-not-have-sharp-objects-or-bottles process was pretty painless, but in running into the relatives we were traveling with - ten of us in all, now - popular opinion found that stance to be wrong. Evidently, in spite of the fact my family (the extended family, mostly) had booked this trip almost a year ago they had decided to split us all up on the plane at the last minute, a fact I didn't really think was a huge deal but apparently was the end of the fucking world to my parents and my aunts, who went off the bitch at some poor attendant who surely had nothing to do with the decision.
Eventually we ended up on the plane, discovering we were in the very back row. My dad kind of ninja looted a seat in that row since my mom and I were together and force-traded his seat with some guy, but he ended up with the aisle seat, prompting him to complain for pretty much the duration of the four hour plane ride about the people rushing to the bathroom. Complaining was another theme of the day - my mother, my father's, my mother's eldest sister... I was pretty frustrated. I was getting more attention than I wanted to, amusingly for things I wasn't. I was kind of pestered about the fact I was quiet (tired, annoyed, nothing to say) and thin (I haven't really noticed a big change here but I keep getting comments about how I've lost weight from family members). Another wonderful thing about our seating assignment was being directly above the engine, which causes said engine sound similarly to what it must be like outside of your car in a car wash. Hearing protection required, indeed.
The flight attendants, too, ended up being very interesting. One of them was, like, apparently fresh out of high school, because flying planes was "oh my god crazy". Her partner was kind of the snobbish "I'm far too mature for you" type which was kind of a funny dynamic, but after we landed we found out why - we could all hear her from the farthest back part talking on her cell about how her son hadn't gone to his first day of work. Apparently, she'd even called him to make sure he didn't forget about the hour change (which was an hour I really could have used today...) and he just stared at the phone as it rang. There's a funny conversation to stumble over...
After riding in the car, waiting for the bus, riding in the bus, waiting in three airplane lines, riding in the airplane, we then proceeded to wait in two more lines, one for the shuttle to the baggage claim and one for the bags themselves. While the baggage claim was getting basically everyone but me in my party complaining, I actually rather enjoyed it. My dad has to take every red bag (my mother's and my bags are red) off the conveyor belt and like juggle it before he can figure out if it is ours or not, which looks absolutely ridiculous.
At some point we actually got our bags, and after being sent to the wrong place by three different employees, we ended up on the bus to Bally's. For whatever reason even though our group was more than half the people on the bus we went to our hotel last, but this ending up being a blessing in disguise. We started on the opposite end of the strip so we got to drive past almost everything, and it was really neat to get to see the Vegas Strip from a different perspective than I was used to. All the bright colors, the people walking, how huge the buildings are... (from the plane it looked like the city just sort of lurched upward on the strip, easily 3 times as tall as the buildings on either side of it) the inability to gamble in this city drives me nuts, but it is sights like those that make this trip worthwhile.
Arriving at Bally's, we got in line for our room, which took about forty minutes. At the end we were informed the room would not be ready until 4 (it was around 12:30 vegas time at this point, so we'd been awake around 12 hours at this point, for reference) vegas time, and we'd need to stand in this wonderful line once again. We gave our bags to some luggage dude to put in their basement behind the corpses for a few hours (or something), and set off to have a meal. We ate at a cafe in Bally's I don't recall the name of and will update later. It's a pretty neat little spot whatever it is, and was somewhere I remembered vividly from my previous trip. There's a keno gimmick inside the restaurant (you don't need to stop eating to lose money gambling!), the food is pretty good, and outside of the fact there's pepsi products but not mountain dew and the waitresses barely speak English it's a place I'd hit up a few times every trip.
After we finished eating we were reminded that Bally's/Paris offer a rewards card that you can use in every gambling machine and restaurant, and that we probably wanted to get one. This was not as easy as it sounded. We spent the next forty minutes walking from one employee to the other, from the cashier at the restaurant, to a security guard, to a janitor, to bartender, to an exchange guy, to a random vendor at the beginning of Paris, to a dealer at Paris, to Paris's exchange table, until we finally found the right place. I felt like I was playing WoW and doing one of those terrible "talk to (random NPC) for 350xp"x21 quest chains. We wisked past slot machines and poker tables and vendors, from Bally's generic vegas to Paris's faux-sky, so at least it was nice to get reacquainted with the buildings. On the way back my mother used the giant slot machine, which is so giant the handle is above her head (I got a picture, don't worry), and wasted a few bucks. We split up at this point so my dad could take me to the sports bar to bet on hockey (I'm down 10 bucks currently, damn Stars!). I intend to bet on this every evening, since it's easy to do in spite of my age and somewhere I feel like I can do better than break even. After this I wandered about the casino a bit trudging along behind my dad, getting yelled at by security multiple times, once at the bar, since even though I wasn't drinking anything I'm not even allowed to sit there (which I knew, and told my dad, but he made me do it anyway), and then we wandered off so he could play video poker or something and I was yelled at for watching him play from a standing position a few feet behind him. Whatever.
I really, really hate getting turned away because of my age. I'm not sure if it's just because I'm so irritated I'm as young as I am (I've always found it funny how people always want to be younger - I'd kill for about thirty), or because in spite of being a villain in real life it pisses me off so much when I get reprimanded, but it pisses me the fuck off. Almost ruins this town for me, at times...
Eventually 4 o'clock rolled around and we finally got our rooms, which are about 60 degrees and don't contain comforters. I loafed around a bit, trying to generally keep myself awake until dinner at 6 (9 or our time, the 17 hour mark for me), and predictably ended up on LiveJournal and Facebook. Home away from home...
We met up with our party to eat at Battista's Hole in the Wall, which at the time I hadn't been to excited about since I really just wanted to go to bed, but oh my god, it was like an orgasm in my mouth. Better than cocks, even. Seriously, one of the best dining experiences of my life. They led off with a choice between salad(italian dressing, of course) and minestrone soup(soup for life) and some really delicious garlic bread, with unlimited water, white and red wine to drink. They didn't card me, but I hadn't really intended on drinking any anyway, but my dad poured it for me and I am NOT a quitter. I ended up getting veal in a lemon, mushroom, and white wine sauce, garnished with cooked carrots and some other vegetable as well as some colorful noodles. All of it was absolutely incredible, I couldn't stop eating. They finished with a cappuccino for desert that was pretty amazing. They also ended up giving us a second... pitcher of red wine, and since we didn't want it to go to waste my dad and I ended up taking down most of it. I am so full right now I can barely describe it and I haven't drank this much in a while either, somewhere between very tired (alcohol, big meal, 19 hours since I last slept now) and generally wanting to explode.
The day as a whole was pretty frustrating, outside of the almost impossibly good meal, but the first day is always the worst so I'm sure it'll go up from here. Tomorrow's big attraction is dinner at Craft Steakhouse, a product of Top Chef Head Judge Tom Colicchio, so I'm pretty pumped for that! Craft has a high bar to reach now, however... we'll see who the real Top Chef is, Tom!