Saturday, November 17, 2007

The Last Frontier

Tonight was a great night to be in Las Vegas. Well, nothing was so great about this particular day, I just had a great time. It started out slow with a dinner for the top 200 real estate professionals in the US. Somehow I was invited to be a representative member from my company to help honor the number 1 real estate agent, also from my company. So the whole dinner was a lot of sitting around waiting for them to announce rewards for every ridiculous type of category. It was almost 3 hours of boredom. The worst part was that you couldn’t order hard liquor or beer. The drink selection was limited to two colors of wine or sparkling or still water. Those drinks were not among my alcohol consumption plan for the evening.

After this drudgery of a dinner finally ended; I and a couple of other managers escaped over to the Blackjack tables. I quickly hit on a good winning streak bring my up several hundred bucks. Even though I was winning I was a bit annoyed with myself, since I wasn’t following my planned betting pattern. Had I done so I would have been up closer to a grand. As it ending up, I won $150 dollars after giving $100 back to the casino. I said waking a away from the tables with a 150 profit was my bottom line and by gosh I was going to do it. I hung around with my coworkers while they continued to play, occasionally offering them playing/betting advice based on my handy BlackJack Pocket Reference card. The card was right on most occasions and my two colleagues both walked away from the tables winners.

As we were wrapping up on the BJ tables, I get a call from my friend Matt who is over at the Wynn hotel with two other coworkers. I walk over to their BJ Table just as Matt is coming off of a couple of thousand dollar win while another was already down for the count. You could see him and my third colleague almost outwardly rooting for Matt to lose as he placed each additional wager. Granted what he was doing was sick. Matt would just walk up to a table drop a 100 bucks, get a double down hand and walk away with 4 stacks for $100 chips. He did this time and time again everywhere he went. I thought it was hysterical while the other guys were getting disgusted. Once Matt cashed out completely, the 4 of us were standing around thinking about where to go and what to do.

I wanted to try out a Club called Jet at the Mirage. It was the type of club with velvet ropes blocking off the front entrance and only by being know in the club or armed with a special pass phrase could you get by. Matt and I went to check out Jet while my other coworkers elected to go pursue some other endeavor. Luckily I knew a name I could use, which was good enough to get us through the crowds waiting outside, but not good enough to get us comped entry or drinks.

Fortunately, I did run into the person whose name I knew, and once he found out how I knew him, he gladly bought us a round of drinks on the house. Having secured free liquor, we hung around and watched all of the hot young women dance around on poles. Lots of Lecherous and desirous looks were shown their ways. I couldn’t help thinking about the fact that the last time I was in a place like this that the current girls I was looking at would have been in diapers. Girls sure do grow up fast. I felt so completely out of place in the club and was wondering to myself had there ever really been a time when I did. I think the best way for me to enjoy myself at these VIP type clubs is to just sit back, relax, drink and take in the marvelous views. I sure as hell know that no one wants to see me dance. But perhaps, maybe it is not too late for lessons and a better club going look.

After Jet, it was a quick pit stop back to our hotels. We needed to get our cameras and warmer clothes in order to hang out and film the Implosion of the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas. To get a good vantage point for the demolition, we went onto the roof top parking garage of the Wynn Hotel. There were about 1000 likeminded people all waiting to see the building fall. They led up to the final moment with great suspense, by providing a rather long pyrotechnics show before the actual big bang. However, when it came it was definitely worth watching. One moment the hotel was there and the next, it was just a puff of dust. A rather large puff of dust that started to descend onto anyone that was in its path. Once the smoke got on top of you it was just about impossible to breathe. Bits of debris would rain down upon you and coat your hair, skin, clothes and eyeglasses in a smooth sheen of dust. I had to ball up a fleece I was wearing in order to take in some reasonably clean air. Standing in the fallout zone of the implosion was not a good idea; however, we got some fantastic photos of it. I’ll post them latter as I down size them for this blog.

After we made it back into the casino in the relative safety of filtered air conditioning, Matt decided to play another couple of hands of Blackjack. In a span of 3 minutes he took another 200 and turned it into 500. You couldn’t stop him. Not even on the walk back to our hotels where he quickly won 40 bucks on a slot machine while I was taking a piss. After I left map, I did manage to get lucky one last time on my own. A particularly attractive woman of color started talking to me and asking how I was doing, where am I going, etc. I told her back to my hotel, to which she explained that she is an Entertainment Girl and would I like to avail her of her services. In light of the fact that this was my only offer from a girl all evening, I considered myself lucky to even get one and a pretty good one at that. Any form of entertaiment I could think of. Ooooh the possibilities. But as it was a late hour after 3:30am, I felt it best that I turn this offer down for now and to think about it for some other day.

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