me: lemme give you the day-by-day details
bruno_boy: ok
me: friday:
me: i was scheduled to arrive about 10:40 pm, but we got there about 15-20 minutes early, and then had to wait about 30 minutes or so for a gate to open up for us to disembark
me: jason, one of senpai82‘s friends, was picking me up at the airport, so i made my way down to the baggage carousels to meet him
me: i saw some girl in a short dress carrying a bouquet of roses walking around, and she saw me checking her out so the first words said to me upon arrival were “hey baby”
bruno_boy: hahaha
me: jason and his girlfriend/fianceé (i don’t know which, or even what her name was) show up and we go to the karaoke bar where everyone else is
me: it’s crazy there at night, it was like 11:30 pm and 88 degrees outside
me: so we get to the karaoke bar and hang out with everyone else there, but jason and his girl end up leaving without me knowing and with them forgetting that my stuff is in the back of their rental car
me: so senpai82 says that he’ll have them take my stuff to my hotel in the morning and then i’ll get picked up by someone else to take me to the wedding
me: so then drew and melanie and her friend jen take me to my super 8 motel (kinda off away from the main stuff in vegas, but about a half of a block away from where the reception would be, and about 3 blocks away from where kylastyles and senpai82 were staying at the golden nugget hotel / casino)
me: so i get all checked in, but i don’t have any luggage or anything
me: and the guy working the front desk at the motel looked like captain kangaroo
bruno_boy: but what about the girl at the airport who said, “hey baby”?
bruno_boy: that’s what I’m interested in 😉
me: hahahaha
me: saturday:
me: woke up, got some free breakfast (donut and orange juice) from the lobby
me: well, backtrack
me: 7:30 am, my phone rings, and i don’t recognize the number
me: my photojournalism instructor: “hey glenn! i’m doing a photoshoot tomorrow if you’re free and interested in helping out?”
me: me: “uh… well, i’m free tomorrow, but i’m kinda in las vegas to shoot a friend’s wedding today”
me: him: “oh. well, i guess you can’t make it then. …and i guess it’s really early there, right?”
me: me: “yup.”
me: so then later i got my breakfast
me: i didn’t know when my stuff would be arriving, and my phone’s battery was almost dead (i was texting people my address and room # and telling them to come by and bang on the door if they couldn’t get me on the phone, or to try to call the room if they could), so i ended up staying in the room until my stuff arrived
me: i had enough time to watch both “dirty jobs” and “rocky 3” before my stuff arrived around 1 or 1:30 pm
bruno_boy: hahaha
bruno_boy: Clubber Lang pities the foo’ who damages his luggage!
me: and clopper mill too!
me: so then around 2 senpai82 shows up, and his parents take us off to the park where the wedding is at at 3:30
me: on the way we miss the turn and have to drive a few miles down the highway and back again since the exits were closed for construction, and we drove through a dust storm too
me: we got to the park around 2:45 (wedding at 3:30) and since i hadn’t had anything to eat yet other than a donut senpai82‘s parents took me across the street to a mcdonald’s for food
me: we get back to the park just in time for the wedding
me: there’s a family reunion or something also in the park, so there’s a moon bounce near us and folks standing around watching us while drinking beers
me: they started to clear out shortly after we were getting ready to start though
bruno_boy: your sinful boozing scared them off
me: hahaha
me: after the wedding we went to this place called “beauty bar” where the reception was — it was this bar that was designed to look like a salon from the 60s, complete with 60s-era furnishings
bruno_boy: Johnny Rockets, Jr.
me: apparently later that night the bass player from the smiths was going to be there as a guest dj, but i didn’t go to that (i think kylastyles and senpai82 did, but i don’t know who else)
me: afterwards spoothed and i got a ride from drew and melanie back to the hotel where spoothed and festive and spelchec were staying, and spelchec and festive showed up shortly afterwards
me: after hanging around in the hotel for a bit, festive and spelchec and i went out to explore some of the casinos on the strip — spoothed wasn’t feeling well and was a bit tired (she was hungover in the morning pretty bad, apparently) so she stayed in
me: yup
me: i don’t remember the particular order, but we went through the paris casino, caesar’s palace, the bellagio, and maybe one or two others
me: in caesar’s palace there was a pussycat dolls-themed pit with some poker and blackjack tables and girls all dressed up in pussycat dolls-esque clothes and the tables had figures of womens’ legs holding the tables up (think “a christmas story” lamp, but as a table-leg)
me: there were two sort of stripper-pole-esque cages in the middle with girls inside dancing, but not stripping
bruno_boy: rowr
me: the lines around it were also super-long because it was right next to the entrance to a lounge/club and everybody was trying to get in
me: this was also right next to the sportsbook betting area where people could bet on different sports; i planned to go back on sunday and place a bet for the orioles to win
me: after all that we made our way back to the car and i was dropped back off at my hotel
me: oh yeah, and in between some of the casinos were all these mexicans who would pass out calling-cards for hookers
me: spelchec made a game of collecting them to see how many he could get by the end of the trip, so i tried doing that too, haha
me: sunday:
me: my hotel was near the “fremont street experience” which is like the old-school vegas, it’s got a few casinos (the golden nugget, 4 queens, and one or two others), but it’s mostly a giant pedestrian mall with an overhang
me: so i stopped in for breakfast and poked around the golden nugget and saw “the hand of faith”, the world’s largest publicly-shown golden nugget
me: apparently some guy was in his backyard in australia and had a metal detector and found this thing about 6 inches below the ground
me: picked up some souveniers for the family, went back to the hotel
me: called spelchec to figure out what they were planning on doing, and then they picked me up and we went to a local mall for lunch with kylastyles and senpai82
me: after lunch spelchec, festive, spoothed and i went to the hilton to go on “the star trek experience”
me: it’s like one of these rides at universal studios or something; first we went on the borg invasion, and then we went on the klingon encounter
bruno_boy: so you were assimilated… sorry, I had to do it
me: GROAN
me: hahah
me: festive and spelchec and spoothed are all apparently huge trekkies so they were taking pictures of everything and i was kind of bored by that and the “museum” of star trek props, but the actual rides were pretty neat
me: there’s some neat tricks they did with the rooms so it was like you were getting beamed up and stuff
me: and they had folks in costume running around and pretending to be borg or crewmembers and they’d shout at you to run around different places
me: the borg one started out with the holographic doctor from voyager saying how everybody in this group has a special antibody in their dna to keep the borg from assimilating them, and then the borg attack the ship and try to assimilate us
me: so after running from some borg and into a transporter we have to put on these 3-d glasses and the transporter gets caught up in the borg cube
me: and they’d do stuff like blow air in the room for when the transport’s windscreen was blown out or stuff like that
bruno_boy: cool
me: and then when the borg tried to assimilate us and send implants into our spine there were these magic fingers in our seats that would make it feel like you were really getting attacked or something
bruno_boy: though I’m kind of surprised to find out that spelchec, festive, and spoothed are Trekkies
me: yeah
bruno_boy: Trekkies annoy me
me: hehehe, me too, to some degree
me: but there was one chick in the klingon experience who looked hot in the star trek commander’s outfit
bruno_boy: no doubt
me: lucky me she was our guide when we got “stuck” in the lift
me: hahaha
bruno_boy: it’s a skin tight uniform
me: yup
bruno_boy: though I prefer the original Star Trek uniforms for the females with the really short skirts 😉
bruno_boy: that’s the 60’s for you
me: hehehe
me: the klingon experience had us like we were in line for an amusement park ride and then the lights went out and there was sound effects and when they came back on we were in a much bigger room than the one we entered, like we were beamed up on to the enterprise
me: it was a really neat effect, really cool
me: so they brought us on the deck of the enterprise and commander riker says (via a viewscreen) that we were brought there because one of us is captain picard’s ancestor, and that the klingons were trying to kill us to keep captain picard from being born, and then the klingons come onscreen to say how they want to kill us and commander riker says over his dead body
me: so then we get in a lift to go down to the shuttle bay and then the attack starts and the lift starts shaking and wobbling around, and eventually we’re let out in the shuttle bay
me: so then we get in the shuttle and it’s one of those strap-in look-at-video-screen fly-around shindigs
me: and we fly off through some wormhole or something while avoiding the klingons and the klingons follow us to las vegas and the enterprise shoots it and blows it up in las vegas, and we “arrive” at our actual location by the shuttle crashing through the elevator shaft in the hotel the ride is in
me: and then captain picard says something cheesy about how we brought him back to life and how we make our own future
me: after that it took forever to go through the gift shop and spoothed spent $100+ in there
me: then spelchec and festive and i went to in ‘n out for food and we filmed “3-2-1 in-n-out burger”
me: then we went to get photos of us by the “welcome to las vegas” sign
me: drew called us to say that melanie and her friend jen went to go see celine dion and that he didn’t have anything to do, so we picked him up at the treasure island casino and went to the luxor
me: festive and spelchec went to some imax ride, drew played in the arcade, and i played some pinball in there before losing $20 at the roulette table
me: the guy at the roulette table annoyed me too, i showed up and he said “do you know the rules?” and when i said yeah he said “WELL, ID FIRST, that’s the rules”
me: grr
me: by the arcade there was this touristy-trap thing where there’s a carpet in front of a green screen, and you could get friends to sit on the carpet and they’d shout out instructions and with the video and the green screen it’d make it look like you’re flying around las vegas
me: we didn’t do it, but it was funny to see some people do it
bruno_boy: geez, hundreds of dollars worth of Star Trek merch and Celine Dion? no wonder Vegas is called Sin City
me: hahaha
me: apparently at one casino in las vegas is a blues brothers show, i think at the house of blues, actually (gee, who’da thought?), and one of the promos for the carpet-ride thing showed jake and elwood blues running through a casino (flying through a casino is part of the ride), carrying a bag with “$” on it, hahaha
me: after that we went to the treasure island casino to see this free show outside called “the sirens of treasure island” (they’ve got pirate ships outside and do effects and stunts), but it was cancelled due to high wind since they’re climbing up on these ships (though it wasn’t breezy, i guess it’d be unsafe)
me: then drew left to meet up with melanie and jen, and we walked through the venetian hotel (it’s got canals and such inside) and walked past some shops and stuff
me: then festive and spelchec dropped me off at my hotel, and they planned to go up to the top of the stratosphere hotel but didn’t since it cost $12 and they weren’t feeling like it
me: then yesterday spelchec picked me up at the hotel around 9 am or so and took me to the airport
me: the end!
bruno_boy: *applause*
me: hahha
me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Experience
me: more in-depth about the rides
bruno_boy: wow, you’ve been telling this story for about an hour
bruno_boy: impressive
me: hahaha
bruno_boy: I think you deserve another…
bruno_boy: *applause*
me: hahahah
…
me: oh! encore to the story:
me: so we were in charlotte waiting to fly back to bwi (connecting flight), and there was this family sitting around me who were just coming back from cancun at one of these all-inclusive resorts
me: and apparently three girls in their group were stuck in customs because they were going through customs with each others’ luggage and not their own
me: but they made the flight with just about a minute to spare, which was good since one was hot
me: and then when we were leaving the plane i almost dropped my backpack from the overhead bin on her and she squealed
me: and at the luggage carousels she had to stand in front of me while we waited for the bags to come out, so i had an A-1 butt-checking-out position when she would bend over the carousel to get her luggage
me: THE END
bruno_boy: “the end” indeed
me: bahahahah
me: if she was a mermaid:
me: *FIN*
bruno_boy: womp womp womp
me: bahahahha
me: and at one point the 20-something year old son was shaking his dad’s seat while we were waiting to get off the plane, and the dad called the son a dickhead
me: the mother: “you called your son a dickhead?”
me: the dad: “yep”
me: the mother: “again?!?”
me: the dad: “still!”
bruno_boy: hahahha!
bruno_boy: oh my god
bruno_boy: hey, speaking girls an such, what’s going on with you and Parker? see her much?
me: speaking of parker, ENCORE PART 2:
me: so we were leaving the “welcome to las vegas sign” that we got photos of, and i snapped a quick picture of it with my phone and sent it to her with the caption “LAS VEGAS WOOO”
me: and she sent a txt back asking why i didn’t send a photo of myself, and i told her that i tried but it didn’t turn out very well in the car and that when we got to the luxor i’d have a friend take a photo of me
me: then she called me to say apparently some guy she knows was staying at the luxor and that she’d see if he was around for me to meet him, but i didn’t hear anything back
me: THE END
and, photos! (which i haven’t yet captioned…)