March madness has begun and one of the places it starts is Sin City. Jay loves to get to Vegas for the Mountain West, as well as all the other tournaments that are played there. When he was still coaching, he wasn’t always able to get to the Mountain West tourney because every once in a while, his own team was still contending in other post season play elsewhere. He had his ticket to this year’s tournament for a month or so.
Then last week, he asked me why I shouldn’t come with him.
“Because I don’t want to?” I answered.
I’ve been to Vegas once. I had a fabulous time. It was nine years ago, when Jay was inducted into the NJCAA basketball hall of fame. There was a banquet, a ceremony and he got a plaque and a gorgeous ring. Lots of our friends and both our kids who were old enough to gamble at the time joined us. Tyler and Megan weren’t married yet but she was with us as well. A group of about 12 of us saw Jersey Boys together. It was great!
But having been there and done that, I feel no need to go back to Las Vegas.
I get why people love it; it’s wild, colorful and fun…yuck.
I don’t like crowds. I don’t like gambling. I never liked noise and the cacophony in a casino renders me virtually deaf, I don’t like being not in my own home. I love my own little groove, doing my own little thing all day every day don’t make me take a vacation!!
But it’s been a rough couple of weeks for Jay (that’s for a different post) and when he invited me to lounge around a five star hotel pool for a week, I had to say yes. Especially when the forecast for this weekend includes another foot of snow. Another foot.
So Zack dropped us at the airport a little after 7 pm. We checked our bags and went looking for some dinner. Our flight was at 9:30, so we were in no rush. It was Ash Wednesday. There are two ways to look at that fact: 1) it’s a terrible day to travel because it’s a day of fast and abstinence, which means no burgers and no whiling away the boredom of an airport with random munchies…or 2) it’s a little known fact that while traveling, Lenten rules are actually not binding.
The non-binding of Lenten rules while travelling date back to the days when it was very difficult to find a Church on Sunday in a strange land and one had to eat whatever was available.
The Barrio at the Humphrey terminal offers an absolutely delicious shrimp taco.
And only fat littlegrowing kids should whine about not eating between meals. Fat little middle aged grand parents should just man up and shut up.
We held to our Lenten observances.
I’d brought several pages of cross word puzzles on board the plane with me. We sat on the tarmac for a while before getting into the air. I did the last two puzzles with my left hand just because I wanted to. I slept a little. Jay had downloaded a couple of movies onto his computer for the flight. He said they were awful. We landed a little later than scheduled. 11:55 pm isn’t that bad until you factor in that LV is two hours earlier than Mpls, which meant that for me and Jay, it was 1:55 am.
That’s what time we landed. Then we had to wait for our bags. Take a shuttle to our rental car agency. Get the car. Drive to our hotel. Find our hotel. Drive around the hotel three times to find a way in that wasn’t through the casino. Find a parking spot. Find the registration desk. Discover that valet parking was free for hotel guests. Collect our bags, find the elevators that still ran to the 28thfloor after midnight. Find our room because they were not numbered in a way with which we were familiar. I believe it was close to 2 am Vegastime before I fell into bed.
And then we couldn’t figure out how to turn off the lights.
Oh, most of them went off easily when we turned off all the switches, hidden all over the room but there were these two, right above the bed, that wouldn’t go off; they just dimmed to an orange nite-lite. Jay and I don’t need a nite-lite, we need a dark bedroom. After much experimentation, Jay discovered that the nite lites could be completely extinguished by rocketing his cell phone into them…
No, actually there was a different trick to the switch but that cell phone thing was the next option.
By that time I was so tired I didn’t even care how hungry I was.
Oh, the view out our hotel room window is to die for!!