So...a few months ago my mama was perusing her Facebook feed when she saw a picture of this:
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| Antelope Canyon (photo from the internets) |
For those who don't know, this is Antelope Canyon - located in Arizona on Navajo land not far from Utah. And only (according to Google Maps) a 5 hour drive from Vegas, which is only a three and a half hour drive from home. Hmm...
My mama then showed my dad this picture and they agreed that since this is so close, we should totally go and visit. This was in February. My parents were in Taiwan the months of March and April, and by that time, all the hotels (dog friendly hotels that didn't look scary on Tripadvisor) were booked up, so we ended up booking for the first week of June. And since it's on the way and I refused to drive 9 hours at once because I am not a crazy masochist, we opted to spend the first night in Vegas, drive to Page, Arizona and stay for two nights - then drive back to Vegas, and stay for two nights because 1) I must have time to eat the world (i.e a buffet. Mmm...) and 2) I must have time to spa. Also, I wanted to see Zarkana, the only Cirque show on the strip I haven't seen yet (well, I also haven't watched Zumanity, but that's not a show I'm ever going to watch with my mama. I wanted to go into the bathroom to hide during the (relatively tame) love scene when we watched Shakespeare In Love together so there ain't no way I'm watching a circus show that simulates coitus with my mama) and since we're staying at the Vdara (yay for hotels who lurve dogs. Boo for hotels that charge you through the nose for them!) and it's playing at the Aria next door, it's convenient!
Anyhoo, because it's Sunday, we went to church in the morning first. We packed up our car the night before and so we could hop onto the freeway right when Sunday service was over and then head over to Vegas. We figured we'd hit Vegas around 3:30-4pm...yeah...that didn't happen.
Anyway, look who was in a good mood and ready to start our road trip! (when is he never in a good mood though? He's always, always smiling.)
So we drive. And drive. And we get on the 15 and we hate life. Because not only were there TWO traffic accidents on the 15 on a Sunday afternoon, the freeway is also under pretty heavy construction and what's usually a 4-5 lane freeway ends up being reduced to two lanes. So we totally hate life. According to Google Maps and Sigalert, our delay was for 90 minutes. And they were right (sob!). What really sucked was we couldn't even get off the freeway to avoid the jam. There was no. way. out. We were trapped (sobbing again!).
After driving for an hour and 24 minutes...
we looked at the odometer and realized we've only traveled NINETEEN miles. Why 19 instead of 31.6? Because it's TWELVE miles to church, so in the hour and twenty four minutes since we left church on our way to Vegas, we've only traveled NINETEEN MILES. (I'm still sobbing on the inside. It was so bad).
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| pardon the dust! |
Even thought I wanted to punch myself in the face, you know who was still in a good mood? I'll give you one guess:
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| clearly it was not dad |
Like I said, incapable of NOT smiling.
Then, after the 90 minutes of wasted time I will never get back, when the traffic started clearing there was a "crossover" section of the freeway. Being a FOB, I had no idea what the hell that was supposed to mean...until I saw that part of OUR traffic was on the OTHER SIDE OF THE FREEWAY. Huh. You learn something new everyday.
And so we drive. And when my mama decided she was tired and it was my turn to drive, it was ONE HUNDRED AND SIX DEGREES. I opened the car door and thought I'd stepped into an oven. This was no bueno. And because of how no bueno it was, we opted not to pee there because we being roasted in a roadside bathroom is not exactly how we envision our vacation starting.
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| see? no lie |
Alas, after mucho hours of driving that we were not expecting, we finally made it to our destination: Bally's Las Vegas.
Now, we've been to Vegas probably like, a hundred times. Seriously. But we've never been to Bally's before. I hate to admit it, but even though I'm a TOTAL cheap ass, I'm kind of a hotel snob. BUT - we only planned to stay one night in Vegas, and since we had no plans for Sunday night other than grab dinner and get a good night's sleep, I didn't want to spend the $280/nt Delano was asking for if I wasn't even going to properly enjoy the room and property, so I looked for the cheapest hotel that would let me bring Bendi in without having to smuggle him into the hotel stuffed in a backpack. And Bally's was it. We got a king bed petstay room for about $130 for Sunday night, and since I'm being super cheap, I even brought my air mattress (a necessity since we could only book ourselves a king suite in Page as all the rooms with two queen beds were sold out) up to the room instead of paying $25 for the rollaway. Because bitches, cheap is how I roll. Unless it's with someone else's money. Then I'm all about extravagance.
Other than self parking being in China (okay, I lie, it's in Paris. And that's no lie. Self parking is actually in Paris, you have to go from Paris to Bally's) and check in being a pain in the ass (they insisted on seeing Bendi to make sure he's not over 50 pounds, and that wasn't as easy since my dad had taken him out for a walk after the long car ride and I had to stand to the side with all my luggage watching everyone else check in while they refused to check me in without seeing Bendi) - it wasn't so bad. (we're not going to talk about the melt down the three of us had when certain somebodies *cough*dad*cough* refused to answer their phone which snowballed into us all freaking out and yelling at each other about picking up the FREAKING PHONE.)
Our room number?
No joke. We really got assigned room 777. Good omen? Well...considering I lost about $11 at the stupid slot machine in some stupid dinky casino while waiting for dinner, I'm thinking our room number did not bring me any luck.
But the room was actually very nice: it was about 450 square feet, and since it's only one king bed, the room was large and spacious. It really doesn't photograph well, but the furniture was clean, as was the carpeting and the bathrooms (I was afraid I'd end up finding weird and suspicious stains, but to my relief did not) and it was actually a very pleasant and comfortable room. It's not opulent, plush, or amazing by any means, but it's a very nice room. Even though the bathroom wasn't fancy with its own soaking tub and water closet making it bigger than my house a la The Venetian, it was pretty spacious. The water pressure (always important) was decent and we were all pleasantly surprised.
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| what's the first thing we set up/out? Bendi's bed. Clearly we have priorities in this family. Dog first. |
So we didn't really have a Strip view. After all, we were in the Indigo Tower, which appears to be one of the older towers. But we could still see some hotels out of the dirty ass window.
And of course, Bendi had WAY TOO MUCH fun exploring the room. He discovered mirrored closets! I don't have mirrors in my house low enough for him to look at himself, so he was intrigued by these mirrored closets.
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| look at him admiring himself. He's probably thinking, "that's one good looking dog in a very dapper yellow vest right there" |
Before our vacation, I of course started googling around for places to eat. I figured we'd likely eat somewhere in Paris since there appears to be a dearth of deliciousness in Bally's, but in my research I stumbled onto Ellis Island. It's a teeny tiny local casino about a block away from Bally's (and thus the Strip) on Koval, and they're super famous with the locals because of their food: I got a prime rib dinner (no joke, real prime rib) for $14.99. And people, it was pretty damn good. I would say it's just a teeny tiny cut below Lawry's. And the ENTIRE MEAL (including soup or salad AND homemade root beer - or their microbrew beers) was $14.99. Where else on God's green earth are you going to find a delicious prime rib dinner for that price? That's about how much I spend on a burger at B.J's. And that doesn't even come with iced tea (sob!). They also had a sirloin steak special: if you join their membership club and play about $5, you get $2 off their off-the-menu steak special: 10oz sirloin with green beans and potatoes and a beer (or root beer) for $9.99 instead of $11.99. That also comes with a soup or salad. Let's just say that we were very, very, very full. So full I committed a horrible sin: I left most of my mashed potatoes on my plate because I just couldn't eat anymore! Oh, the travesty - carbs should never be wasted, but I was having the meat sweats and just couldn't hang anymore. My mom isn't into big ass slabs of red meat, so she got the shrimp scampi with linguini. She was less than impressed, but she's also a picky eater. I thought it tasted pretty good, but as I was preoccupied with my big slab of meat, my dad ended up eating her dinner. He had opted for the sirloin and I opted for the prime rib, and we had decided we were going to split both steaks in half so we could both have sirloin AND prime rib because we are pigs who lurve cow. He ate half of my prime rib and her whole dinner. HE had about a bite of his sirloin and he said he couldn't do it anymore. Instead of throwing it out (and he said he wasn't going to eat leftover steak the next day) we decided to just slice it up and bring it back in a doggy bag for Bendi. My mom didn't want him eating the grilled char marks, so she actually ended up eating the well done portions of the steak (outside) and she sliced the rest up into small pieces for Bendi to snack on. I ate my half of the prime rib AND half of his steak AND some green beans and some mashed potatoes. I was thisclose to hating myself. But it was sooo good. And SOOOOO cheap. My mama, she ended up eating all of my dad's steak fries (she's a big fan of fries), his green beans, and some of my mashed potatoes. Our entrees came with soup, so she had the chicken noodle (I got the same, it was really freaking good, and I'm not even a fan of soup) and she ended up leaving pretty full herself. Basically, her dinner was a bunch of sides and a few bites of my dad's steak. But she enjoyed the soup and liked the fries and the mashed potatoes. So for about $40, we were very well fed.
I had intended to walk over to the Linq Promenade or whatever it is they call themselves to the new Sprinkles to buy some cupcakes for dessert. But because I was suffering from the meat sweats and food coma, I couldn't do anything except to walk back to our hotel and collapse. The walk there around 7 was in broad daylight. The walk back was around 9pm and it was already dark. As we're walking through the intersection of Koval and Flamingo all I could think was "this is where Tupac was shot" (though not where he died) and sadly, there were some homeless guys wandering around there too. My mom was kind of freaked out by all the homeless people and we felt better after we crossed Koval and there were lots of tourists walking around by us. As we were about to enter Bally's through their sports book entrance on the side, we see the "dog park". Indeed, it is a "dog park" in quotation marks because a real dog park consists of more than some astroturf dumped onto a cement sidewalk. It was just sad.
Bendi was very happy to see us. He was even happier to see this:
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| see how attentive he is? |
Bendi then had a dinner fit for a king. Or a very, very, very spoiled little dog. He was in a very good mood afterwards. Because of the long drive, mom and dad opted to go to bed pretty early - it was lights out by 11pm. I was fooling around online and looked over to see this:
Somebody was goofing off in their carrier. Alas, the long day caught up with me by midnight and I felt the need to crash. So I did. And thus ends our first day - at Bally's after a rocking cheapo dinner and a scary walk back to our hotel.
The next day, we're going to Arizona! by way of Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Arizona, Utah, and finally Arizona again.
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