Glamorous Las Vegas. Any time is a great time for Adult Movies! |
I knew I was living the dream that everyone dreams of living - the dream of being shacked up in a tawdry hotel room next to the infamous Block 16 site, where saloons, gambling, prostitution and illegal prohibition alcohol had put their brand on this town. But sometimes, it gets a bit repetitive. And you need to get out and about. And there were definitely some things on my to-do list that didn't get to-done last time because I was too busy coughing up biscuit sized pieces of lung and possibly a vertebrae or two - at least, that was what it felt like.
And that's why I rented a car from Avis for the rest of my trip. Much as we enjoy the limo lifestyle to and from the airport, I wanted to explore another option and see what it would be like to get a car from there and return it when I left town, rather than book another one-way limo ride.
(You may again recall the Quad Queen and my arrival and departure dates differed. She'd be leaving on Sunday, and I, a couple of days after that.)
So.
Car. Done. I had a plan.
I also arranged to get a couple of days off so I would have a four day weekend, unfettered by the ridiculous shenanigans of the GrommetCon 2014 wind-up.
Today was supposed to be Norbert's "team building" day where we would spend five or six hours listening to rhyming and alliterative platitudes pasted up hastily on some ill-conceived powerpoints, rife with insulting cartoons illustrating how to and how not to work as a team - 'oh look, Mr. Don't-bee Dickhead is pulling out Mr. Teamy's office chair and Mr. Teamy is about to fall ass-first onto a Vlad the Impaler spike - hahaha' - and have some shitty lunch made up of stale crackers, all the same kind, artfully arranged, pieces of cheese with condensation on them, little bunches of grapes, none of which would break the 'three grape maximum per bunch' rule, thus making it impossible to eat anywhere near enough of the damn things to satisfy any kind of a grape jones, sandwiches cut into thirty-two tiny fucking pieces each, and if you are lucky, half an aluminum tray of luke-warm Costco lasagne, with no serving spoon to be found anywhere, and, which, when you try to eat it off a soggy paper plate with a plastic 'spork', either breaks the tines off the plastic 'spork' or alternatively, gets flung with enough kinetic energy from the unavoidable bending of the plastic 'spork' to fly across the room and paste itself to somebody's Daffy Duck tie (clip-on), and then after that, you would spend the afternoon taking turns falling backwards into your inept team-mate's arms in some twisted demonstration of how much wanting to keep your job can override the implicit distrust in which you hold said team-mates, half of which are in the bag from sneaking out to the parking lot before lunch to down 4 or 5 miniatures of Canadian Club.
No, living the dream of the tawdry hotel room and the tawdry Block 16 casinos was wayyyy more my idea of fun.
We decided to start off at the California again, on our good ole non-music playing slant tops near the cage, where we'd gotten our asses handed to us in spam cans morning after morning. This time, though, we would employ the super secret and untested Micro Parlay (Strict Rules of Parlay) Parlay.
The California Hotel and Casino features musical chairs lessons at 11:00am sharp! |
The Quad Queen did very well, parlaying one of her five dollar bills up to quad deuces on 50 cent Bonus Poker.
We headed over to Main Street for some triple play and the Quad Queen said, "Hey, you got Agent Magenta!"
"Huh????"
"Agent Magenta. That's four Aces. Agent Puce is a regular four of a kind. Agent Silver is quad 2s, 3s or 4s. What I really want is Agent Orange, a Royal Flush."
"The unfortunately named Agent Orange..."
She said she pays attention to the color coding of the quads on triple play and hopes for various colors to show up, which she dubs Agents. Nothing surprises me anymore.
My odd pictures show that she also got a straight flush and another scratch card.
You'll notice I'm not hitting a goddamned thing in these morning pictures, so it was a good thing I had the car rental chore to do.
We braved the breakfast buffet at Main Street Station and I really started to wonder if the Quad Queen was cracking up.
This is what she came back to the table with.
I've been going on about Salad Bar Pre-mix, well this looked like Salad Barf. (But it wasn't it was delicious corned beef hash.)
On a pancake.
With army eggs.
I, on the other hand, turned my savvy style to concocting the most elegant of morning repasts:
That is a mexican omelette of some sort, cheese blintz, morning 'taters (with C.T.U.G.), disks o' sausage (spelled almost like the famed Irish composer of love poetry, and relative of Pyramid O'Creamers, Dicks O'Sausage). And a little oval waffle, reminiscent of the little oval waffles I used to get back in the day at the old Imperial Palace. (But that is a vintage trip report for another time.))
After breakfast, it was time for me to execute my plan. I carefully researched the time for the WAX bus, and headed down to the stop with a few minutes to spare. I'd ride the WAX to the airport, go into the terminal, simulate arriving in Las Vegas by having a whiz, exiting the terminal, wandering about aimlessly looking lost and shaky, desperately trying to find the rental car shuttle bus pickup point.
I'd then ride the shuttle like a real pro to the off-site rental car compound and get my Avis-mobile.
Well this was all great until the moment I realized that I'd looked at an out of date PDF online and the WAX times were completely different. I'd balled this up but good, and the only thing to do was to deke into the Fremont for a quick Boner Deluxe session.
I got on the end machine by the keno lounge, nearest the door, and the machine was ripe. It was bursting. I could just sense that it was going to give up a Royal. Indeed, twice I got four-to-a-Royal and ended up with a straight.
Ultimately, it didn't burst its gushing juices of ripe moolah all over my lap. No, time ran out. I had to cash out my ticket and run for the WAX.
I hopped on and listened to some music on the half-our ride to McCarran. Saw some interesting things too.
Golf cart in acid-land. |
Flowers blooming on jet exhaust. |
It was great to hit the open road, window open, sun shining. I felt a long way from the snow and cold that was still sport-humping half of Canada. I reveled in the fresh air, and the 18 horses under the hood, whining to be put out to pasture.
When I put my foot down, I heard a yelp and the car practically leaned into action. It was as if the wheels were going around! I put my foot down harder, heard more yelping, and I swear, the Corolla moved! If this kept up, I was going to lose my oval waffle!
Next destination - Fry's. How to get there? I wasn't exactly sure. So I headed south. And I got lost. Kind of. I knew where I was relative to Las Vegas Boulevard, but I wasn't sure if I was south or north of Fry's. I went through some residential areas and saw some cool things, like this amazing rose bush.
I decided to turn right and try to navigate to Fry's and found myself at the south end of a bunch of outlet stores. How convenient, since I needed shoes to replace the horrible black ones that didn't go with my white socks. In a nutshell, I bought two pairs of identical New Balance shoes. Discounted, and buy one get one half price. Score!
I pressed on. Fry's. Electronics heaven. I wandered around and picked up a couple of ChromeCasts - one for me, and one for Jimmy Poon. And, I saw what had to be a harbinger of luck!
Fry's are experts in everything. You know you can trust your precious electronic data and online social media content to the products they sell.
Fry's. Expernts in high tech. |
I love the scale of things downtown - I didn't bother to remember my floor number - it would have to be one of only two possibilities. Why bother?
Back in the room I met up with the Quad Queen and I told her about my adventures.
"So what do you want to do?" she asked.
I was down pretty far on the day already having had no quads at all. But I had an inkling.
"I have an inkling. I have to get back to that machine at the Fremont. All trip long I've wanted to get on a Boner Deluxe run, and I haven't done it. I am going to play that thing until it gives up quads."
"Let's go."
Where is acid-land located?
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