Vegas, baby!

Every weekend since New Year's I have known at least one person visiting Las Vegas for the weekend. A few times I have had multiple friends there for different things. All of them posting on their Twitter feeds or status updates or email chains about how they were headed to Vegas! Not that I am jealous, okay yeah, a little jealous.

I love Vegas. It really is grownup Disneyland. People wear things they wouldn't wear anyplace else, they drink more than they would anyplace else, they gamble, they go see shows, they just live a different life for a few days. Now I know that a lot of people wonder why I like it so much, I am not big on excess, I don't drink too much, gamble too much, don't smoke at all but I love watching it all. So I thought I would share some Vegas tales, because you know what happens there really doesn't stay there no matter what people say!

The first trip I ever took I thought I was going to hate it. Brent was in the Navy and we were getting ready to travel to our new duty station. Friends of ours were going to be in Las Vegas for the weekend so we took the time to go out and visit with them. I was pregnant with Christopher at the time and very sensitive to smells. So we get to Vegas and check in to our non-smoking room which was so permeated with stale smoke I thought I was going to die. But the hotel assured us that it was a non-smoking room and any other would be worse. But the weekend visit was fun, we got a chance to catch up with our friends and Brent made enough money at Blackjack to keep me in quarters for video poker. After our friends left we moved to the Strip and spent a couple days there. We went to the King Arthur dinner show and I LOVED it. Just the right blend of hokey and corny for my sense of humor.

The next trip was with USA Boxing for the National Finals competition. This is one of my favorite trips ever even though it was as far from a standard Vegas experience as you can get. I believe the only gambling I did was dropping a quarter in a slot machine at the airport on the way home. The very cool part of this trip for me was the underbelly of Caesar's Palace. Because we were working a boxing event with the hotel as a partner all of the athletes and the group from USA Boxing got pass keys to the back working areas of the hotel and the employee cafeteria. Now underneath the hotel is a huge area that houses everything it takes to make a huge hotel work. The laundry facilities and linen rooms were amazing to see. I wish I had been able to take pictures of it all, but we weren't allowed to take cameras into these spaces. And the employee cafeteria? Oh my gosh, I asked one of the security guards how much weight a typical employee gains when they first start, and he said it was like the freshman 15 from college! The same cooks and chefs from the restaurants through the hotel worked shifts in the employee cafeteria as well, so the food was outstanding. We had a few boxers working extra hard to make weight that week!

Then when I went back to work for L/N I was in Vegas at least twice a year, one memorable year I was there 6 times, including a stretch where I was in back to back meetings so there for a week and a half. Which is too long to be in Vegas for sure. Three days is about perfect without business, you can stretch it to 4 or 5 with meetings, but it still gets to be awfully long. Fly in one evening, get there around 6 or 7, check into your room, head out for the evening, next day wake up and spend some time in a spa or at the pool, then head out again, next morning sleep in then catch an early afternoon flight back out. Just enough time to enjoy yourself, not so long as to get tired of all the flashing lights and noise and smoke. That's a perfect Vegas vacation in my book.

Anyway...Vegas travel with work. What is the hardest part of the Vegas experience at work is going out in the evening and having fun while still being able to get up and be presentable and engaged at an 8 AM meeting. It's tough. And it's amusing to look around the room at the more wild of the bunch sitting hunched over a cup of coffee looking just as miserable as they could be, but knowing that as soon as the meetings are over for the day they are going to rally and want to head back out on the town again!

Traveling with clients is always a trick. You have to stay out as long as they want to and go drinking with them but never get drunk enough to embarrass yourself or forget that you are on the clock the whole time. It makes for a tiring trip. But if you are lucky then you have people you work with that you are also friends with so you can let that guard down a little and actually have fun. My co-op clients would spend every Christmas meeting in Vegas for a stretch. Those were some of the most memorable trips with the least amount of business. Just a time for everyone to celebrate good sales and good times.

I have a mish mash of memories from all of those work trips so I am going to share a few as a batch, know that they aren't all from one trip! One of my first work trips my friend Scott taught me his favorite game to play in a Vegas bar. Hooker/Slut. Simple rules, when an attractive woman walks in and starts chatting up a guy at the bar you have to guess which she is either a working girl there to make a living or a party girl there for the weekend to have a good time. There is usually a spirited debate amongst the group before you come to a conclusion. Now every time someone new would come on a trip they would have to be taught the game. One of the best things to ever come from this game was the words of wisdom from my friend Jenny. We spent an evening playing Hooker/Slut in the bar at The Palms during a Christmas meeting that happened to be held at the same time as the bull riding finals. Well, Jenny after observing all of the action for the evening picks one woman as a slut and we are all sure she is a hooker. Nope, Jenny is adamant. Why? Well...she announces..."Hookers don't wear hats." Hookers don't wear hats never fails to make a group of people I know burst out into laughter. And she was right, hookers don't wear hats so always bet slut if she is in a hat. :-)

I also learned how to gamble for cheap from my friend Don. He taught me how to play Craps for hours on a $10 investment. Now any evening that is spent laughing with friends, getting free drinks and everyone is happy and it only costs $10 is a good night. That was my first taste of actually letting go of money to gamble it. The first few trips I took with KFC that was all I did. Stand next to Don at the table and gamble my $10. Not much of a gamble, but fun any way. Then I started playing Blackjack. Now when I say I play Blackjack, what I mean is I sit at a table with a group of franchisees who tell me how to play. I know it's just numbers but the whole system to it flees my mind most of the time so I just look to my left or right and someone tells me stay or hit. It works for me. I paid for my massage table and my massage chair with winnings from Vegas. Those were great trips!

I also love all of the sights of Vegas. Seeing the waters at Bellagio, seeing them again from the top of the Eiffel Tower, the White Tigers, the Pirate ship, the shark exhibit...The Star Trek Experience was one of the most fun things I have ever been to. I am a huge dork (as most of you know) and these things are fun and goofy and cheesy and I love them. The other sights I love are the people. Scott says there is a section of the closet for some of these women labeled "Vegas Clothes" and they would NEVER wear them anyplace else, but oh my gosh...the things they wear or I should say don't wear in Vegas! My favorite is to see the married couples, she is dressed in a sequined blouse cut down to there with heels up to there on to match the shortest skirt she has every owned...and he is wearing a pair of cut off shorts, sandals with socks and a t-shirt that says, I'm not as think as you drunk I am!

There are so many more stories I could share, but this is already really long and I fear horribly boring to anyone but me! Vegas, baby...