We pulled into the Flying J truck stop just outside of Vegas to shower and complete the transformation from crusty road trippers to groomed on-the-towners. Then we dumped. I know, I know, backasswards. But there was some hidden logic behind it all, and regardless we wound up where we needed to be when we needed to be there, and we did so without smelling like hideous road warrior fung or the infamous Poopie.
We knew they'd be dining Friday evening at Emeril Lagasse's New Orleans Fish House, which was inside the MGM Grand. That was the extent of what we knew. So we snuck around to the hostess and peaked at the long booked reservation list, and spotted their reservation at 8pm. We had about an hour and a half to kill, so we headed to a sushi joint down the Star Walk and tried to spot them coming in.
Long story short, they arrived and we people-watched in a cafe across the walkway while they dined. When the dessert was to be served, the waiter woul deliver a bottle of Tullamore Dew (the debt of a three-year old bet), and we'd see what happened from there. It worked great, and we think they were very surprised, since by all accounts we were in Colorado heading towards the Lone Star State.
Our lame excuse for a photo this entry.
We spent the weekend in Vegas with them, looking on as Neil kept "Reelin' 'em In" and Rochelle got "Filthy Rich" with the little piggies. Lady luck was definitely chaperoning. Jack basically won whatever he tried his hand at, and Amy drew quite a crowd at the Big Bertha showdown at The Golden Nugget. She literally had to put her full body into pulling the handle as the slot machine on steroids lined up teaser after teaser, but no big winners.
We haunted the craps tables at the cheap spots, like Casino Royale on the strip, which shares its sign with a Denny's, and various old-time smoke-filled, lounge-singing, hideous carpet joints off Fremont Street downtown. We ran into a few character croupiers, from a 5'2" caballero-lookalike bopping to Britney Spears to Le, an English-challenged, unsmiling man angry at the world and nearly oblivious to the game.
Shortly after our favorite foursome headed off into the sunset back towards Cali, we took the roll of quarters that Neil's small nephew Randy had expertly rolled, give or take a quarter or two, and headed to a triple draw poker machine. We dumped them all in and as the last quarter dropped, we got a royal flush. Ching ching ching. The hand balanced out the roll and then some more.
We tried that evening to get into Mysterioso on stand by, but we couldn't keep our lids open with enough vigor to make the poker winnings worth the ticket. The show is renown to be fantastic, but we'll just have to catch it on another trip. We headed back to our mobile hotel room and crashed.
