OK, so Vegas. Oy.
It's no Reno, thank God. (In Reno, where we stopped when we were moving from Monterey, CA to Washington, DC, we ran by a Starbucks on a Sunday morning before continuing our trip, and we saw more than one person sitting at a slot machine drinking beer (at 9am), smoking and on oxygen.) But Vegas is not my jam, bruh. I'm not into gambling, and sad to say the people we saw in the dozen casinos we went into looked neither hearty nor hale. And the smoking. Too much of it. Drove my nose crazy.
Did hear some foreign languages, so that was nice. Wife and I stayed at Caesars for three nights of the six nights we were visiting our son and DIL. While walking through the Forum Shops of Caesars, we went into a gallery for
Vladimir Kush. Lovely, strange, Dali-esque art. We asked the woman running the place if the artist was Russian: she was immediately apologetic: Oh no, he used to be. But he's an American, has been for 20 years. I went out of my way to explain to her that we didn't care if he was Russian, but I'm sure some might have walked in and turned around as soon as they realized the artist is Russian. Sigh...
But I did get to use my Russian for about 10 minutes, which was nice. My wife always gives me crap when I "accidentally" bump into some Russian tourists as an excuse to speak Russian. This time, it was natural. ))
Crazy other stuff too, to include someone stealing my government credit card info AND my Hilton Honors info and booking a room in Tampa. I called the hotel and prep'd them for the a$$hole's arrival. They let him almost check-in, took copies of his ID and credit card, then asked him about stealing my info. He ran out of the hotel. I got my hotel points back.
When we got to Las Vegas, we had to wait over an hour (at 10pm) in a rental car shuttle line till I could get to our rental. Our son came and got my daughter and wife. When I got to the rental car center I stupidly got in line and waited 20 minutes for my car. I say "stupidly" because it turns out I'm a FastBreak member so I could have gone right out to the garage and got into the car. Doh!
Then upon returning to the airport in DC, it took me 4 attempts to finally get an Uber (at 11pm, due to our flight being delayed an hour), and then only by paying a bit more for Uber Comfort. 8 minutes out and the guy cancelled the trip. I then got charged $28 for his trip, as well as $44, $45, and $54 for the three previous attempts (all these via email).
My daughter ordered an Uber and this driver actually came. Then I got an email saying the $28 was refunded. Interestingly, the other 3 charges were not on my Venmo, nor did my bank see them. Crazy weird.
It was nice though to see the boy and his lovely wife.