I know. I stopped posting again.

Life just seems to have away of getting in the way of me writing.

Here is a run down of what has been going on.

After my last post, Michelle found out her aunt in Baltimore had a heart attack & was in the hospital. Michelle & her mom packed up the next morning & drove to Maryland.

A blood clot had formed & caused the heart attack. I guess the doctors were trying to figure out what had caused the blood clot & one of their concerns was possible cancer. Luckily the tests came back negative.

They have put her aunt on blood thinner to get the blood clot to go away.

Michelle got back home Monday morning around 5am. Her mom decided to stay longer & will fly back here tomorrow (Sunday).

Next -

I think it was Wednesday I found out my brother’s “body scan” test results had come back. Good news- no cancer in his brain, liver, kidneys or back. Due to the kind of cancer he has, they were worried about that. Bad news- there is cancer in the lymph nodes in his stomach area (in addition to lymph nodes in chest area & the tumor in his lung).

Wednesday I went to the doctor that had discovered I have Barret’s Esophagus & he scheduled me for a follow up endoscopy on March 4th. He wants to see if the prescription I have been on has helped with the inflammation. He will also do another biopsy to see if the cells have stopped “mutating” towards cancerous cells. If the medicine has been working, this should turn out ok.

Then on Thursday (yes, more stuff happened), Michelle’s aunt (the on staying at Michelle’s property in Peachland, NC) called & said someone had tried to break into the building Wednesday night. She could hear them messing with the locks & trying to pry the door open.

We think they tried breaking in because Michelle’s mom’s car was not there (she had left it at our house when they went to Maryland).

Unfortunately the only phone her aunt had was a cell phone & it doesn’t work inside the building, so she couldn’t call the police. See, land line phones DO still serve a purpose.

Luckily they were never able to get in & eventually left.

The police came out, took pictures & said they would do extra patrols around the building going forward.

Friday morning before work, I installed some parts on my motorcycle to move the foot controls forward about 2 inches. This will allow me to straighten my legs out a little more while riding. Unfortunately it is raining today & suppose to snow tomorrow, so I haven’t been able to road tested it yet.

Friday night my beer brewing supplies showed up. Yes, I am trying another hobby. Damn A.D.D.

I will start the brewing process either tonight or Sunday & hopefully in 6-8 weeks I will be sipping some good home made beer with Michelle, my friend Jared & his girlfriend Jess.

If it doesn’t go well, in 6-8 weeks I will be sipping really nasty tasting home made beer while Michelle, Jared & Jess sit around wondering why don’t I just pour it out.

You know what? This iPhone blogging software comes in handy. So far I have killed 40mins while waiting for Michelle to finish a doctors appointment.

Unfortunately the way things have been going, I will have more drama to write about. So I guess it’s a good thing to have this software so I can use it when I need to kill time.

And you never know, I might eventually write about our last day in Vegas, also known as “Damn, we fly home today”.

Ok, doing all this typing on phone is starting to get to my eyes (and finger).

Guess I am done.

For some reason I feel like I just wrote a script for a TV show. So should I say “good night America”, how’s that for an ending?

Started out the day the same as all the others. Woke up around 7:30-ish, had some breakfast.  Walked around almost pouting, knowing the next day we were going to be heading home, back to the real world.

One of the few hotels out on the strip that I had always wanted to see was the Luxor. I guess it is because seeing it from the outside, looking at that HUGE black pyramid was just drawing me in.

On the way to the strip, we decided to swing by one of the outlet malls. It was a nice sunny day, so walking around an outlet mall sounded like a good plan.

Well, sunny the day was. Guess what else it was? WINDY. Not just a little windy, I mean WINDY as hell. It was like 15-18mph sustained winds, with gusts up to 50-55mph. The gust weren’t just occasionally happening. The gusting happened A LOT.

So we walked around the outlet mall quicker than we wanted to, but the wind made it necessary. We did stop in the “Coach” factory store so Michelle could pick up a couple things. I also made a stop. Some of you that have known me for awhile should remember I have a thing for sunglasses. I have always liked sunglasses & owning many pairs of sunglasses. Unfortunately about 4 or 5 years ago I found out I needed prescription glasses. This put an end to my collection of sunglasses. I wound up having 1 pair of prescription sunglasses & that was it.

Well about 2 or 3 months ago I found an eye doctor that worked with me for about 1 & 1/2 months getting contacts to fit me just right. So guess what that meant? I could start buying sunglasses again… WOOHOO. Anyway, back to the Vegas story. I stopped by the Oakley factory store & picked up a pair of Oakley Crosshairs. Of course I couldnt just buy a pair & walk out. I spent over an hour trying on different frames & different lense combinations. What Michelle says took the most time is the salesperson told me about the custom lenses that had different gradients (where the lense color gradually gets darker as you go from bottom to top). I finally settled on a pewter frame with bronze gradient lense.

Here is a picture of the frames - LINK

After all this we finally headed out to the strip to see the Luxor.

Here is a pic from outside -

Here is a pic from the lobby -

After walking around for less than 5 minutes we decided we really did not like this hotel/casino. It was confusing trying to get around anywhere inside it. There was no central casino. Instead there were “pockets” of slot machines & card tables scattered all over 1st & 2nd floor. We only stayed long enough to walk around once twice get lost & find our way back to the main entrance.

Here is a picture of the ONLY thing that the Luxor had that may have made staying there ok -

So we headed back to Fremont Street & by this time had definitely decided downtown was for us & we may not venture back to the strip if when we come back to Vegas.

We wandered around Fremont Street for a little while & wound up back at bingo. So many times we were both 1 number away from winning. Oh well. Bingo over. Time to head back to the 4 Queens.

Once back at our hotel, it was time to play for real (bet more money than we had previously), after all this was our last night in Vegas. Remember we are not “rich” so playing BIG for us may still seem like small bets to others.

The previous evening I had found a video poker machine that also played blackjack. I had put in $20 and was betting a quarter a hand. I played on that machine for almost 90 minutes before I lost all of it. So tonight I decided to put in $40 and play the max bet of 50 cents a hand. Whenever I won on a hand I would “let it ride” so essentially I would be betting $1 a hand. A couple times when I won after a $1 bet I would let it ride again. Within about 20 minutes I was up to around $120. Of course I didn’t stop. Once I was down to $100 I figured I had done so good earlier I could get it back no problem. Well in about another 30 minutes I had lost it all, so I decided to go find Michelle.

I found her at the 3 card poker table. After watching for a couple minutes I decided to sit down & play. I put down $40 and this time watched how many chips I had so I would not make the mistake I made before.

I made sure I kept $40 worth of chips separated so I could easily tell if I was actually winning or not. I decided to walk away once I had about 4 losing hands in a row. Luckily I was up to around $140 or so.

All in all it was a good night.

I think we got to sleep somewhere around 1 or 2am, had to be up early so we could get everything ready to leave…….sniffle….

Woke up at 7am (looking back, I did not sleep much while we were in Vegas).

After breakfast we gambled some at our hotel. Michelle put in $10 in slot machine & won $94.  I started off my day losing $60, but then I won $85. This would have been pretty good if I hadn’t lost approx $200 the day before.

After a couple hours of gambling we decided to head out to the strip to see what everyone else comes to Vegas to see.

We started off by parking at the Bellagio. This is, in my opinion, one of the nicest hotels on the strip.

Here is a pic from outside -

Here is a picture of their indoor garden -

After walking around their casino for a few (and losing around $40) we decided to go walk the strip. Since we were at Bellagio we started with checking out their dancing fountains -

Bellagio fountain panoramic photo -

Here is a pic of us outside the Bellagio -

From there we walked the strip on our way over to the Imperial Palace. On our way we passed through Ceasars, the Flamingo & maybe a couple more places.

Here are some pics of the garden habitat at the Flamingo -

We went to the Imperial Palace so I could see what they bill as “the worlds largest private auto collection”. From a car guy’s point of view, it was amazing. Hundreds & Hundreds of cars. Alot of them were priceless. I would say about 60% were for sale. The most expensive on that had an actual listed price was $6.5 million. Michelle overheard someone ask about one of the cars that was listed as “inquire about price”, the guy was told $10.5 million.

They had all kinds of cars. One of a kinds, prototypes, Johnny Carson’s 1940s sedan with original bill of sale, the car from Starsky & Hutch & a replica of the Mustang used in Gone in 60 Seconds (Elenore).

There were A LOT of cars listed as “Not for Sale”. Among those were 2 cars that the information listed in front of them said they were the only 2 cars in existence

Panoramic shot of the 2 cars -

Here is a link to all the pics I took at the car show. I know some of them are blurry, most of them were taken with the IPhone & it does not had a shakey hand control. Be warned there is around 400 pics. I think we spent a little longer than 2 hours walking around here. Believe it or not I did not take pics of everything. There was around 40 or so cars I did not photograph - LINK

After all the walking we did at the car show, we decided to find a faster way back to our car. So we decided to take the monorail from the Imperial Palace to Bally’s. Bally’s hotel & casino is right next door to Paris hotel & casino so we took a couple pictures outside there.

This pic looks a little strange. It was taken from a walkway that had tall glass “walls” & some reflections off the glass showed up in the pic -

When a person passing by saw me taking a picture of Michelle, he said he would take a pic of both of us. “Go on, get up there with her” he said. I was worried he would run off with the camera, but he didn’t.

Here is a pic of Bellagio at night -

After this we went back to bingo. Hey once you win $500 at it, you cant stop.

After bingo we went over to Main Street Station for food. All in all it was a good decision. The food was delicious & the portions were huge. What sucked was the service. It took forever for the waitress to get our food from the kitchen. Michelle saw it up in the serving window about 5-10 minutes before it was brought to our table. She never came back to us to see if we needed more drinks. Once we were done eating, I finally got her attention (she had been walking right by us all night) while she was helping a table next to us. I asked if we could have 3 to go boxes & our check. She looked at how much food we had left. When she dropped of the one to go box, she actually said “I forgot you were here”.

WHAT? Did she just really say that? I had to ask Michelle to make sure I heard correctly. Then I realized she walked off, 1- with only giving us 1 box for all our food & 2-without our bill. She had carried about 5 boxes over to our table, but only left one. I followed her up to the counter & asked if I could have 2 more boxes. She said and I quote “You know I thought you may need more, but I figured you would put it all in one box”. Once again - WHAT?

Needless to say, she didn’t get a tip. Which with the food being so good, it would not have been difficult to get a tip out of us.

After that wonderful adventure we walked back to our hotel by passing through 3 or 4 other casinos. That is another nice thing about staying downtown on Fremont Street. If you don’t want to walk outside, you can use a lot of the casinos as short cuts. On the way we played a few slot machines. Won some, lost some.

Once back at our hotel, we stopped in the restaurant & had some desert.

After this Michelle said she was tired & went up to the room. I hung around the casino. I found a video poker machine that also had blackjack on it. It was either 25 or 50 cents per hand. I played for about 90 minutes on that $20. That was the longest $20 had lasted me the entire time I had been in Vegas.

I think I fell asleep somewhere around 3:30a.

Ok, next post - day 6. We spent some more time out on the strip.

I know I was trying to post everything about our trip to Vegas. I was trying to get one post up daily, but life got in the way this weekend.

Sunday morning around 4:30am I hit the road heading to New York state to see my brother. Some of you may know already, he was recently diagnosed with cancer. My sisters and mom had went up there last week. My sister Betsy had decided to stay with him for awhile to see how he would respond to his treatments.

Because of work, I could only go up & spend a couple hours with him Sunday evening, pick up mom & my other sister to bring them home Monday morning.

The drive up took about 12hrs. That included stopping for gas, food & a 90 minute nap that my body insisted on taking.

The trip back to a “little” longer. My mom & sister are smokers & have to take more bathroom breaks than I do. Between this, dropping my sister Lisa off in Tennessee & going by my grandma’s house the trip back took about 15 1/2 hrs (with no nap).

Today is catch up on sleep day & then I will get back to finishing Las Vegas posts.

Oh, I also got to see my 2 “great” nieces for the first time. One is 2yrs old & the other is 7 months.

Here are some pictures-

Driving through Pennsylvania, the water that had been seeping through the rocks froze into HUGE “icecicles” -

Pics of my great nieces -

me - lisa (sister) - buster (brother) -

they next morning -

Ok, awake at 7:30. I swear one day I will get more than 4-5hrs sleep.

More of the usual, breakfast at our hotel (the specials of course), then out to the strip for more “sight seeing”.

We had a buy 1 get 1 free card for a show at the Stratosphere.

The show is called “BITE”. It is a vampire show set to classical rock & with 2 for 1 tickets, we couldn’t pass it up.

While at the Stratosphere we looked around a little. We almost stayed there because the price was cheaper than our hotel & it is a “Strip” hotel so I thought it may be nicer. After seeing how much we like being downtown I was already glad we had made the choice we did. Well after walking around the Stratosphere I was definitely glad we did not stay there. It was dirty looking & had some really “scary” people walking around. Also the neighborhood was definitely less than desirable.

After that we headed on back to Fremont Street & our hotel. Spent the day walking around to some of the other downtown casinos & essentially just losing money everywhere.

The show we got tickets for started at 10:30pm, so we did dinner & then headed down to the show.

It turned out to be a really good show. They started off by having their female vampires wander through the crowd. Somehow I was lucky enough to have 2 of the vampires come by & drag their nails around my head. The 2nd one made sure to “claw” my back before she left. Other than the normal singing/dancing stage show, 2 of the people also were “aerial acrobats” spinning around the audience hanging off of a chain coming down from the ceiling. Unfortunately they did not allow any cameras.

Here are some pics I found on the web – Pic 1 , Pic 2 , Pic 3 , Pic 4

Went to sleep somewhere around 4am (after more rum drinking & slot machine play). Actually got 7hrs sleep. WOOHOO

I woke up early as usual. Michelle got up around 7:30a.

Right after Michelle waking up, our room phone rang. I was a little confused since everyone we knew would call us on our cell phones. It was the maintenance man talking in a very professional tone (I think someone else was around him). He said they had to put our room “out of order” so they could fix the banging problem with the A/C. He said since we had been inconvenienced over the last 2 days they didn’t want us to be dealing with all the noise they would make fixing it. So they were moving us to another room, but the only rooms they had available in the tower we had “specifically” requested were smoking rooms. To make up for moving us to a smoking room, they were upgrading us to a full suite with a jacuzzi/hot tub. Then as he was hanging up the phone he whispered “keep it on the down low”.

WOOHOO…. room upgrade. This room would have cost somewhere around $400 a night.

When we got down to the front desk to get key for the new room, the lady told us to go up & make sure the smoke smell didn’t bother us. Then she smiled at us & said “once you see the room, you may be able to overlook any smell.”

Ok. This hotel is not once of the 5 star super hotels you sometimes see pictures of. But it was still nice & this “new” room was awesome. Lots of space. An actual bar with 3 barstools & a large “mini” fridge. A great view of Fremont Street & the mountains in the background (first room was on 8th floor, this on was on 17th floor). The window actually slid open about a foot. So at night we were able to listen to the music from Fremont.

Here are some pics of the new room –

Here is the view from the new room -

Here is link to panoramic shot I took hanging out the window of our room -

LINK

After looking over the room & telling the front desk person we would definitely take it, we headed over to the hotel restaurant for breakfast. They had 2 specials – French toast, bacon or sausage & 2 eggs or Ham steak, 2 eggs, hasbrowns & toast for $5.95. Guess where we ate breakfast every morning?

After breakfast (and moving all of our stuff to the new room), we headed out to the strip to look at all the “fancy” hotels & casinos. The last time I was in Vegas, I was there for work & didn’t get a chance to see any of the other hotels or casinos. Even thought I didn’t want to stay on the strip, it was interesting to see all the hotels & the different designs, both inside & out.

Our first stop was the Venetian. They have modeled it after Italian architecture. They even have the Venice “canals” inside the hotel.

Here are some pics –

Then we went down to the famous “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign.

Next we went over to the Rio hotel. This is where Michelle used to stay all the time. We had a 2 for 1 for their “World Carnival” buffet. It was normally $18 a person for this buffet. They had a BUNCH of food. It was a very good late lunch, especially for the price.

When we got back to our hotel I stopped by the nickel slot machines again. Since Wheel of Fortune wasn’t paying out for me anymore, I moved on to “Monopoly” slot machines. It had the spinning reels like most slot machines, but then if you hit the “bonus” it gave you a Monopoly board to play on. I put in $24 & won $99. WOOHOO. Yes, I said $24. I had put in $20 & when I was down to about 20 cents, I put in another $5, I had one of those things gamblers call “a feeling I would win”. Unfortunately in between my winnings from the other day & this one, I had lost a good amount also. But hey, that’s what you expect to do in Vegas. And that “feeling I would win”, that is just a way of not admitting you can’t walk away from the machine.

Pic of winnings (after this the novelty of taking pics of these payout slips went away)-

At 6:30 we headed over to the casino that had bingo every night. Michelle decided we needed to be there for the 7pm session since it was double pay out. After seeing how easy it was to use the electronic machine, Michelle decided to switch over to using it instead of using the normal paper bingo “cards”.

The final game of the session is something the call “coverall”. As the name implies, they call numbers until someone has covered all the numbers on their sheet. Michelle won the coverall & the prize was $500. WOOHOO….

Next we headed back to our hotel/casino. Michelle had been wanting to play a card game called “Pai Gow”, so we sat down at the table & both cashed $50 for chips. What we didn’t realize is on Saturday nights all the card tables increased their minimum bets. This one was now up to $15. We had already started betting so we couldn’t walk away. So we bet $15. In a VERY short time I had most all my $50 & Michelle had lost part of hers, so we moved over to 3 card poker. Between playing slots & three card poker I won about $140 that night.

After that we had the $7.95 prime rib special again. Being a steak lover, there is no way I could pass up that meal. EVER.

I went to bed around 3:30am & woke up about 7:30am. Damn I didn’t think it was possible to get less sleep than I normally did.

Ok, that is it for day 3 update. On to day 4.

Thanks for reading so much.

Yes I know my last post was long, this one will probably be long also. Get over it.

Ok, so I woke up at 5:30a Vegas time. I let Michelle sleep until about 7am.

She woke up with her first beer hangover. Now she understands why I don’t drink beer anymore.

It was a long night trying to sleep. Every 15-20 mins there would be a loud banging noise. Come to find out it was the air conditioning.

On the way to breakfast we stopped by the front desk & told them about it. After breakfast we headed back up to the room to get ready for our drive out to the Valley of Fire State Park. After about 5 minutes the maintenance man showed up. He was a very nice guy. He messed with the A/C & said the problem was something with the metal covered filter not fitting tight. He said he would get some velcro put on it & get it to stay in place. As he was leaving I decided he deserved a tip. He said he would make sure it was quiet by the time we returned.

The drive out to Valley of Fire took about 45 mins or so & was awesome. We saw a lot of scenery neither of us had seen before. The rock “mountains” are actually sandstone formations “formed from great shifting sand dunes during the age of dinosaurs, 150 million years ago”

Here are some pics –

I saw these holes way up the side of the mountain that looked like caves & had to go check them out -

If you look close, you can see me in this one -

Here is a pic I took with my phone of the “cave” -

Michelle stayed down where it was safe & took pictures -

Here is a couple links to panoramic pics I took -

Pic 1

Pic 2

If you want to see all the other pics, here are the links -

Pics taken with camera

Pics taken with Iphone

We got back to the hotel about 5pm. After arriving back in the room I once again heard the horrible LOUD banging of the A/C. So I called the front desk & asked them to tell Doug (that was the maintenance guy) and let him know the noise was still there. With in what seemed like 2 minutes Doug was knocking on our door. He said he thought it was fixed. I had figured out the noise happened every time the A/C shut off. Doug figured out it was the water pipe that controlled the cooling of the temperature that was making the banging noise. Every time the A/C shut off the water pressure made a BANG. Doug told us he technically was off the clock & wasn’t sure what to do to fix the problem. Then he asked if we could live with it until the morning. I started to say no & then he said if we could, he may be able to get us upgraded to the next higher room. So I told him if he could do that, yes we could deal with it 1 more night. I don’t think he would have offered the upgrade if I wouldn’t have tipped him.

We decided to order room service for lunch since the prices were almost exactly the same as down in the restaurant & that way we could rest after our journey. Here is a pic of my burger -

While Michelle took a nap, I decided to go visit the Wheel of Fortune machine that was so generous to me the day before. With in 30 minutes I had lost $60 on it. Well that was fun, interesting, a learning experience.

After Michelle woke up, she said she wanted to go to bingo. She loves bingo & there isn’t really anywhere to play around where we live, so I agreed. I had thought bingo was an old lady game. Yeah, I was wrong. You would be surprised at how many younger people were there & guys too. So I got an electronic machine. The thing was awesome. You didn’t have to do anything but sit there & watch it. Bingo was fun. $60 for both of us to “gamble” for 1 hr. The cheapest gambling we had found so far & people were actually winning. Some sessions paid $480 & you had the chance of winning up to $5000 on the last game.

After bingo we went back to our hotel for dinner. The restaurant their had $7.95 prime rib special (included 2 vegetables & soup or salad). Hell for that price I expected something barely resembling prime rib. I was wrong. We were served the same style prime rib I have paid $25 for elsewhere. Guess what we ate almost every night for dinner???

Here is the view from the restaurant looking out over the casino –

Michelle decided not to drink, but I picked up her slack by throwing back a few Captain Morgan & diet cokes.

Around 1am I won $72 on the nickel slot machines. This softened the blow of losing $50 right before that at the card tables.

Got to sleep around 1am, but once again woke up around 6am. Damn, I need to get sleep sometime. Put ear plugs in so I wouldn’t have to listen to the A/C banging.

Ok, that is it for day 2. Not as long of a write up as day 1 was.

Now on to day 3.