June-July 2015 - 1000 Degrees /Free Play is King/ Goodbye to a Man Who Met Elvis
Prelude
I had a very generous free play offer from one casino for June, and then an even better offer. with more freeplay, from the same casino for July. The game plan would be to start and end the trip there. The icing on the cake is when the Golden Nugget Laughlin sent me a "we missed you" offer which offered to match any freeplay I received from any other casino for a stay in June. This was now set up to be the highest grossing freeplay trip ever for me. As far as the heat goes, I know that typically, June and early July are pretty dry in LV and the monsoon flow moisture typically comes in late July and August.
I rushed to book rooms for these great offers, but finding decent airfares less than 30 days in advance, in the summer, proved to be a great challenge. I found the best fare I could find and wound up using a free companion voucher I had in my Delta account from having their credit card for paying off the second ticket. I was able to book my trip to hit all 3 of these key offers, and fill the other days in with my typical other hotels in between. Costco came through with a very reasonable car rental price, as usual, $181 for a week, all inclusive, for a full size car that had 81 miles on it. The trip was all set!
I was watching the weather in the days before we headed out there, and noted that the dew point was -11 on the day that I looked. Yes, a negative dew point. As dry as it can be. However, I noticed as we inched closer to our trip, the dew points and temperatures were heating up above normal. I saw forecast temps in the 110 range for the 10 day forecast! So much for missing the peak heat of the summer!
For some reason I did not take many pictures this time around so the report is a bit pic light.
Note: Clicking on a picture brings up a larger view of it.
Palace Station being Palace Station
A couple of trips ago I played a bit at Palace Station while using a MyVegas award there. I guess that put me back on their radar as I received an offer for a "Split or Take All" dinner and drawing. I was trying to figure out if the expected value of the drawing was better than another offer they sent me that came with free play, so I emailed a host there (my drawing offer encouraged me to contact a host to book the event). As more common than not, my email to the host with questions went unanswered. I decided to book the drawing anyway to check it out.
Knowing this was Palace Station and wasn't a really high end event, I was hesitant about going for the dinner there because I suspected it to be blah food. (The menu was one of the questions for the host which was unanswered) So, we decided to skip the dinner part and go to the Cosmo buffet (there is a section on that later in the report) and then to the drawing, arriving after the dinner. When we arrived for the drawing, dinner was still being served (a buffet), and one of the main items on the buffet for the drawing guests was, drum roll please, spaghetti and meatballs. There also was some chicken breast dish sitting in some creamy lemon sauce. Nothing wrong per se with those foods, but in LV on vacation, we like to eat nicer meals Well now, after dinner, it was time for the drawing.
They gave each participant and their one guest each a drawing ticket at the registration. Now the casino GM took the stage to announce the beginning of the drawing.
First he announced that all the people with red tickets had to move to one side of the room (there were about 300 people attending), while those with blue tickets had to move to the other side. One problem with this was some of the attendees were elderly and some in wheelchairs, etc, so splitting up the couples in those cases probably was not pleasant for them, as they would have to be left unattended for a time. Imagine 150 people or so all having to stand up from their seats at the dinner tables, leaving their significant others, and having to find a seat across the room. It was a bit chaotic. Surely there would be a good reason for this seating request, right? ;-) Well, the first step of the drawing was to have someone select an envelope that had a red or blue entry inside it, and then only those with that color ticket would qualify for the next step of the drawing. That's it? That's why everyone had to move to sides of the room? Okay, a bit odd, but let's continue.
Now he asked for all those with the blue tickets to come up near the stage, and they even had a rope set up to keep the remaining contestants separated from the rest of the guests. Now we would learn what the Split or Take all meant. For each future round, they would ask the remaining contestants if we wanted to split the $15,000 in cash equally, or go on to eliminate 50% of us to double the cash award per person. All it took was one person to say they want to go for more money and we all would be required to go on. So, right now we had 150 people and the award was $100 each in cash. All it would take is just ONE PERSON to say "continue" and we would eliminate another half of us. Several people shouted out to continue. Here is where I started shaking my head. Now, instead of this drawing being a "positive experience", that is, talking about winners, and winners advancing, it was now a negative experience, picking names from the drawing barrel to publicly eliminate each person, by their full name. The 75 names were drawn, one by one, and each of those people name's were announced, and were eliminated. Think of how long it takes to pick 75 entries, read out their names, and ask the person to raise their hand, one by one. That's not the worst part of it. Just to rub salt in the wound, after the person raised their hand, the GM would shout out "see ya!", or "your gone!", or "get outta here", something along those lines, in a taunting kind of tone of voice. Yes, it was meant to be fun from his standpoint, but I could see how it would be belittling or obnoxious to some people, having this shouted out to them just as their moment of disappointment came, being eliminated from the contest. I was hoping someone who was eliminated would do something to show their disapproval, like yell back at him "why don't you leave instead!", but there was no such entertainment. I stood at the back of the remaining group, shaking my head, cringing at this process. After some time, a man who was also standing behind most of the crowd near me must have seen my reaction, and he chimed in agreement. "Nice way to run a contest" he said to me. I said, "well this is my first Palace Station event, and this is what I had feared, Palace Station being Palace Station", referring to the lower end nature of their business. We agreed how this whole elimination method was awful, and had some good laughs about it, and how it was typical of Palace Station.
Well the two of us made it through the first round after 75 names were read. Now the prize was $200 each to the 75 remaining, and again it would take just one person to shout out that they wanted to go on. Now it was clear, there were 2-3 people right in front of the GM who had that gamble for it all mentality, and would be asking to continue again and again. It appeared that at least 95% of us wanted the sure $200, and to end the drawing, but no, we would continue now to another round. Our only hope was to hope for those 2-3 people would be eliminated next, so the rest of us could actually take some money home.
I was eliminated in the middle of this next round, and was waved bye bye to by the GM. I knew this whole event experience would be one of the noteworthy stops of the trip, but the whole experience was so negative that we decided to head out from the drawing room after elimination (which many others did too), rather than staying many more rounds while the "go for it all" gang kept voting to go another round. I have no idea how it ended up. I'm glad I went though, just to see the way they ran this whole thing. Leave it to Palace Station to run a contest where than names picked in a drawing were to eliminate you, rather than have you advance to the next round. I'm sure a college marketing class would have a field day studying this as a case of how not to run a promotion.
Since this would probably be the first and last time we saw a Palace Station room, I took some pictures of the room and the view. The room had a cheapish feel to it, even though the furnishings looked fairly new and the room photographed well.
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| Views from Palace Station tower room |
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| This was the view OJ had when he went to Palace Station "to get his stuff back" from someone staying here. (The crime he was sent to prison for happened in the Palace Station hotel) |
Cosmopolitan Buffet
I had always wanted to try this place, and had a 2/1 coupon from the LVA that had expired in March. It was posted that the Cosmo agreed to honor the existing coupons given in Jan to March, until the end of the year, via a memo that was sent to the slot club booth staff in late March. I knew there was some risk here, as things like this tend not to go smoothly for me. We handed over the coupon at the slot club and the first representative said it was expired. I explained there was a memo in late March that said this was to be honored until year end. The rep called the supervisor who through the rep, told us that that too had expired and they decided to no longer extend the date. We were told that if we wanted to pursue this further to go to the main slot club booth and ask to speak with the supervisor. We headed to that booth and there were two women and one man behind the desk. We approached the man with the coupon and before we could ask to speak to the supervisor, he took a pen and circled the expiration date. Surely he was highlighting this and going to give the coupon back to us. He began writing on a pad, scribbling away. What was he doing? We kept silent. He tore off the sheet and handed it to us. It was a 2/1 buffet authorization! I have no idea if he was the supervisor or not, we never got to that point. But, he was pretty young, and looked too young to have that position. I don't know if we were lucky or not, if the true supervisor would have honored the coupon, but it didn't matter. We had our 2/1!
Typically I don't pay for dinners, and this is the first dinner that I even partially paid for in many years, but since the 2/1 coupons are rare for the Cosmo, and it was a place I wanted to try, we handed over the $43 for the 2/1 buffet, as a new experience.
I'm not sure how I would review it. It certainly was good though. What was surprising is how small the buffet and the room was compared to the other top end buffets. The seating area was about 1/3 to 1/4 the size of Bellagio's room. The number of dishes was half of that of the other premium places, but the quality was good. This place was the fist to introduce the mini portion buffet concept. There wasn't any dish that floored us, but the Lamb Lasagna was unique and very tasty, with large clumps of ground lamb inside the one layer of pasta cheese and sauce. Half way through dinner a large crowd came in, and it was entire wedding coming in full wedding wear to eat at the buffet.
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| Mini salads and a creamy cone with caviar at the Cosmo buffet. The one on the left was a highlight, very fresh and crunchy. |
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| Loved the mini metal milk carton |
"And the heat-my God, the heat!" - Elaine (The Burning, episode 16, Season 9, Seinfeld)
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| The date was wrong of course, but this was the temperature at 10:30pm in LV that night! |
You know its hot when you hear LV locals commenting on the heat/humidity. Each day now was about 110 degrees, and the monsoon flow was upon us early, bringing up the dew points to the 50's making everyone uncomfortable. One morning however was a bit breezy, and it almost felt humane outside. We decided to make it to the St Rose Trail next to the M Resort for a run, armed with water and a cooling towel and with a planned shorter distance than normal. I follow the yearly insane Badwater Ultra Marathon in Death Valley and wanted just a little taste of what they experience. We made it through the shortened goal and the water was gone before halfway. At the end, I felt a little different and knew that was all I could reasonably run in these conditions. The problem was that even the LOW temperature each morning at around 5 am was OVER 80 each day, and in Laughlin one day the low was 90!!!! So, there was no real way of escaping the heat by exercising outside early!
As it was about 110 each day I began to realize the if you took the high temperatures for each day of the trip, including the day we arrived and the day we returned, the sum of the temperatures was about 1000 degrees, so I thought it was a fitting partial title to this report.
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| Tues to Thurs ended up being a bit warmer than the early week forecast! How do you like those lows? |
At times if felt not so bad, but at other times it was "oh god, let's get inside"! In all, it didn't really stop us from doing much, although we did cancel plans to see a LV 51's baseball game as the typical temperature even at 11 pm was 100 degrees on most days!
I came up with a theory based on this experience that once the temperature is over 98.6, that breezes make the body feel warmer instead of cooler. This because the air is now warmer than body temperature and will pull the "coolness" from the body into the warmer air. There were a few days when at around 110 there was a breeze, and did nothing to make you feel cooler.
Something that became apparent due to the heat is that in several hotels, the elevators aren't air conditioned. Normally you don't notice this, but when it is 110 degrees, its obvious. We had several crowded elevator rides with still 100 degree-ish air! The worst was Harrah's Laughlin. In fact, even the suite we had was kind of warm as the A/C had trouble keeping up to the 114 degree heat, even with it set on max for 24 hours.
The other seasonal impact we noticed were how many more families with children were everywhere. I'll refrain from commenting about how many children under 3 were being dragged around the casinos and hotels by their parents after 11pm at night. In many of the hotels we stay at in April May and October, we get our choice of seats near the water, with air temps near 90. Here, even with the 110 degree heat every pool and beach area was jammed. Harrah's Laughlin even checked keys to see if you were a guest before letting you by the beach! In the dozen or so times we were there before, that was never done! After sitting inside most of the time in the lounge, we dared move to sit outside for a while in the shade at the Harrah's Laughin Diamond Lounge for about a half hour in the 112 degree heat and watched as the monsoon storms moved north over Arizona across the river.
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| How about a picnic? |
Golden Nugget Laughlin
As I said in the intro, the marketing offer that I received to match another casino's freeplay is what "forced" me to book this trip. We only stayed at this hotel once before, many years ago as a stopover on our Grand Canyon trip and only stayed there about 10 hours. I knew that the rooms had been updated by the relatively new owners and was looking forward to staying there. After this experience, we would never stay there again.
It started just after checking in, when I thought I heard steps behind me as I walked back to the room, but no, it was someone walking in the hallway in the floor above me! In our room we heard every step on the floor in the room above us, which ended up keeping us awake as they didn't go to sleep until around 2 am. Mind you, I don't believe anything they were doing was worthy of a noise complaint. They weren't jumping, and there was no party in the room. They were just walking across their floor. Then, they were up early, around 7 am, and then too we heard their pounding foot steps and it woke us.
The reason for this is the construction. It's an old 4 floor hotel. Four floors! There are two hotel wings, separated by a courtyard, so that 3 of the four sides of the buildings have a crappy view. Being only four floors, it was constructed not from steel and concrete, but mainly from wood, likely with plywood floors, so there isn't much sound insulation and footsteps are heard pounding through the wood. As well, we heard simple normal voice level conversations from the room next door, almost being able to make out their words. I will say that the mattresses were the best we had in Laughlin, but it really didn't matter.
What did we do? We immediately booked a comp room at Harrah's for the second night in Laughlin, where we were upgraded to a comp suite.
I redeemed my freeplay at the Golden Nugget on crappy 7/5 bonus machines after finding that the former 8/5 Bonus video poker machines had been removed/downgraded. There was no reason, gaming or lodging, that we would ever want to stay or play in this casino again, so we played only about 50% more coin in than my freeplay offer and then cashed out, netting about 80% of my freeplay.
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| An eclair from the Aquarius. Note the dime for size reference! |
Now, here was the funny part. The next night in our "quiet suite" a monsoon storm came in at around 2am with 40-50 mph winds. These winds found every nook and cranny in all the walls in our corner suite, exposing every fault in the cheap mid 1980's single pane windows, causing them to "sing" and whistle. Down below, palm trees were bending, and anything not heavy or tied down was blowing across the lots below. It lasted about 45 minutes, and eventually brought some rain with it. Still we had a better night sleep than the prior night.
Pictures from Harrah's Laughlin:
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| View from the Range restaurant. |
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| View from the river via the Laughlin Water Taxi |
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| View from top floor suite. |
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| Purple-ish stormy sky reflecting on the river |
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We see this property across the river all the time, but were now high enough to see that it has a pool. |
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| Sunset to the west in Laughlin. |
One of my little hobbies is collecting pictures of unique signs. I added another to my collection when I spotted this on the window in our suite at Harrah's
Once every few years on the way back from Laughlin we go the one mile south on route 95 to the California border after getting gas in Arizona. We end up visiting 3 large states in a half hour. This time I noticed, especially from the back, that the Welcome to California sign had been used for target practice.
The obligatory Bellagio conservatory pics
The theme this time is undersea.
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| The clam shell opens every few minutes, see short video below. |
Casino Collectibles Convention
The annual Casino Collectibles Convention happened to be in town during our trip and while they charge admission the first two days, on the third it's free to come in and look. I am not a chip collector by any means but I do have a small casual collection. There were about 40 tables of vendors set up, mainly selling casino chips. We looked around and I purchased some cheap ones, 4 chips for $10 total. It was fun seeing all the vendors exhibits and the history of these collections.
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| The four chips I purchased. |
Casino play - Do I really have to talk about it?
I had about 5 years of 5-7 day trips where I would hit one royal flush per trip, which was a little above expectation, but not wildly so. On these trips I would come home a winner. Since then, the last few years have been feast or famine. I am currently going through a famine. No royals for a week long trip means a loss, almost definitely. I will highlight one session which still makes me shake my head. I attempted to play at the Cal downtown but the machines I wanted to play were taken. So, I walked over to Main St Station and the Boars Head bar to play some Jacks or Better. I was hoping to play for a bit and hit a Four of a Kind to get one of their scratch off tickets.
After about five minutes of play, I hit a four of a kind (4K) and waited for my first scratch ticket which was $2. About 15 minutes after that, I hit a straight flush. The bartender heard the long sounding payout and asked if I hit another. I told her no, it was a straight flush. I had thought for a second about asking if there was a scratch ticket for that, but then I remember the name of the promotion, "Score for Four", which obviously was talking about 4K. Behind me appeared an attendant with a scratch card, and she told me the 4K and higher gets a scratch card! The bartender had called her over. That was nice.
I continued to play and in 5 minutes, yes, another 4K and another scratch card. Two hands later, I hit another one. I started to pile up the scratch cards, and I liked that they had put the time of day on most of them, documenting how quickly I was hitting these hands. Five minutes later, I hit another. Eight minutes after that, yes another 4K for a scratch card, my sixth in about 40 minutes. This was getting crazy.
It took me a whole half hour to hit another 4K (that is still a bit better than statistical expectation of about one every 45-50 minutes or so), but 6 minutes after that, I scored again. 10 minutes later, the hot streak continued. After 7 minutes, another 4K. Three minutes later, another. 2 minutes after that, yes, again, now 12 scratch cards! None of this timing is an estimate. The time of day is written by the attendant on each Score for Four scratch card.
It took almost an hour to hit another, but 8 minutes after that back for another 4K. 15 minutes later, I hit my 15th scratch card. The only bad part was ALL of the scratch cards were for the $2 minimum win.
Now I had 14 4K's and 1 straight flush in a 2.5 hours. It was really less play time than that because of all the time I spent waiting for the attendants for the scratch cards. So my active play was just over 2 hours. Now of course you would think I was a big winner, right? Well the last hour was pretty bad, and guess what? My end result was that I was even except for the straight flush! Yes, I was only up 250 coins after 14 4K's and 1 SF!! So, was I lucky, or not? To have a session this full of 4K's and yet if it wasn't for the straight flush I would have been even! That is how my luck went this trip. This was my good luck session, can you imagine the bad luck sessions on the trip?
I took pictures of the backs of all the scratch cards with the times written on them (that is how I got such detailed timing of the wins above), but I am not posting them because I don't want to have to take the time to black out my players club number and the signatures of the slot attendants.
GOODBYE TO A MAN WHO MET ELVIS
This next part I am a little careful to write about since I am publishing someone else's story and I don't want to cause him unwanted attention or invade his privacy. I will not use his name. A couple of others have posted this story of his on the Internet at other sites, and this has resulted in some people crudely coming in to "see the guy with that story". I know most here are reasonable nice people, but I also know that some might not be, and I want to protect him from any of those types.
I have known this story for a few years, but I am writing about it now since he just retired a week or so ago, sadly (from my selfish point of view), so now he won't have to worry about people coming in looking for him just for this story.
This man is the best waiter in Las Vegas. He has worked at Hugo's Cellar for over 30 years, and he has more energy and enthusiasm for his craft after all this time than any of the others there, some 20-30 years his junior. He brings life to the place, and makes dinner not just a dining experience, but a fun one as well. However, the man is not a clown, its not about a show, its all about his natural personality and his love of people, his customers.
He has many many stories of his life in Las Vegas, where he has lived most of his life. His father was a chef at the Sands, and he has stories of his father cooking for and meeting the likes of Dean Martin, etc, back in those days. But he has one special story of his own.
When he was a teenager, he was dating a girl that was able to periodically get tickets to see Elvis at the International (which is now the Westgate). He estimates that they saw Elvis live about ten times during his residence, which is impressive alone. One day, he got this idea that the two of them would go the hotel and go up the fire escape stairs to get to the floor where Elvis lived, while Elvis was performing downstairs.
They found the right floor, and to their surprise, the door was open to his very large suite. They couldn't resist going in for a look. So they did. They walked around, amazed at the furnishings and his clothing all around the room. They weren't taking or damaging anything, just enjoying the thrill of being in Elvis's room. One thing that really caught their eye was the large bear skin rug.
Well, for some reason (I am a little blurry on this), Elvis's entourage came back to the room earlier than they expected and they were caught in his room. For sure the police were going to be called. But just before that happened, Elvis himself showed up in the room and asked what was going on. His team told him what happened and that they would handle walking the kids down to get them out of his way. Elvis though would have none of that. "They're just a couple of kids not doing any harm, let them be" he told them.
Elvis proceeded to have a little chat with them, and then the fun began. He told the boy, "go ahead, take one of my shirts from over there, pick one for yourself". Our future waiter went ahead over to the rack and did that. Then Elvis handed him a pair of his cuff links to go with the shirt! For the girl, Elvis told her to take one of the bags of fan mail that were piled up, to take home for herself. I know this sounds kind of odd, what is someone going to do with fan mail sent to Elvis, but that's what he came up with. It's sure better than being arrested. And with that he sent them on their way.
Now our future waiter was just in his teens, and very into motorcycles. Yes Elvis was a big star, but when you are a teen, you probably can't really value something like this. So, unfortunately, Elvis's shirt and cuff links were traded................ for motorcycle parts, which just ices the cake on this amazing story.
Now, how many people have met someone that actually met and had a conversation with Elvis?
We said our goodbye's to our waiter friend, and wished him luck. If there was a top 3 list of things we looked forward to most on our Las Vegas trips, dining at his table each trip was one of them. We would plan our trips so we would never dine there on a night he had off, and always requested his table, getting seated by 5:30 so he would be a little less busy and had time to spend to chat with us. In the future there, the food might be almost as good, but our dining experience there will never be the same.
MISCELLANEOUS
Just a few days earlier, I read about the two escaped convicts being found in upstate New York, and what one of them possessed at the time of capture, including bug spray and Pop Tarts. So, I was wondering if that triggered a new appreciation of Pop Tarts when I saw this downtown at a bar..
I don't like the downtown talentless "entertainers" but this one put enough effort into it that I was amused.
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| Bartender,I'll have the usual; a gin and tonic, and a Pop Tart. |
I don't like the downtown talentless "entertainers" but this one put enough effort into it that I was amused.
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