Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Las Vegas Road Trip



This post is a long time coming. I apologize in advance if it is TLDR. It has already been a month since I took the road trip and it was about damn time that I blogged about it. A little bit of history first, the idea to go on a road trip to Vegas originated from watching a day long marathon of History Channel's Pawn Stars. It was during this marathon that my brother jokingly reminded me that I had yet to sell the Country Legends autographed guitar that I had purchased at a charity auction earlier the previous year. I jokingly responded by saying that I should drive to Las Vegas and attempt to get on the Pawn Stars show and sell my guitar there. For some reason, we both got really serious about the idea and just sort of ran with it since 1) my brother has never been to vegas and 2) I really wanted to go to vegas again.

So we set out. I drove from Houston to San Antonio to pick my brother up from his school on a Friday after work. The next morning we woke up around 6:00am and proceeded to drive to Albuquerque, NM, some 800 miles away. That first day was rather uneventful. Getting stopped at the border control stations along the way always makes me nervous for some reason. I mean, I am a legal citizen who is also not a drug mule but nevertheless I always think in the back of my head that I am one of those drug mules who doesn't even know it and I would end up going to prison like in that awful Claire Danes movie Brokedown Palace. I was also pleasantly surprised at how nice of a city Las Cruces was. I guess I really never had a reason to think it would be a dump other than the fact that it is in the middle of the freaking desert and I just figured it would have more of a The Hills Have Eyes kind of vibe. I couldn't have been more wrong; Las Cruces had a Jack in the Box and Super Target and everything else you would expect to find in a civilization. Albuquerque was nice too.

Ok so the next morning we got up early again and hit the road bound for the Grand Canyon. This segment of the journey really struck me at just how empty the parts of northern New Mexico and Arizona really are. At best we would see a truck stop every 80 or so miles but pretty much everything else was just flat plains with the occasional mountain range. Oh, and the 4 for $20 Indian t-shirt deals that were advertised every 4 miles or so. That day's trip was relatively short compared to the epic 13 hour drive the day before. We arrived in Williams, AZ around 1:00 local time and attempted to check into our hotel. The story about this hotel is so long and ridiculous that I will spare you it right now for another blog post. Anyway, check in time was 3:00 so we decided just to grab some food real fast and do all of the Grand Canyon stuff that day before checking in to the hotel later at night. The Grand Canyon was awesome as usual.

I was pretty surprised at the amount of foreign visitors that were there. I would say that maybe 30-40% of the folks there were French and maybe another 20% of the people were from Asian countries. I didn't remember it being so culturally diverse the last time I was there.

Quick tangent: On the way to the Grand Canyon, my brother and I got the opportunity to go to Meteor Crater. Set aghast by the $15 dollar admission fee, I began plotting my revenge. While exploring the crater, I picked up a small rock on the outer rim and put it in my pocket. I sure showed those guys! Now fast forward to being at the Grand Canyon. I decided that it would be in mine and all future generation's best interest if I hurled the rock from Meteor Crater into the Grand Canyon. And I did exactly that. Think about it, in 8 brazillion years (that's 4.7 years in metric), alien archaeologists are going to be poking around in the Grand Canyon, find my rock and say "By golly, Grog, this rock shouldn't be here, this throws my whole view of ancient Earth in a New Light I tell ya". Grog is the name of an alien, in case you couldn't pick that up through context clues. Also, the aliens are from the southern region of whatever alien world they come from.

Moving along, the next day was the day we would be driving into Las Vegas! Having driven this route before, I remembered that we would be passing over Hoover Dam. This was an unexpected bonus from my brother who had never been there before. The water beneath the dam looked even lower than the last time I was there when it was already pretty damn low. According to Wikipedia, the entire basin is expected to be dried up in the next 20 years. Scary thought for folks like me who like Las Vegas having electricity and running water. But that is a problem for future people to figure out…it was time to do some gambling! We stayed at Bally's since I had complimentary nights there. I like staying at Bally's because it is right in the middle of the strip and you don't have to walk too far in either direction to get where you want to go. So we did some gambling and my brother won quite a bit of money right off the bat with his bullshit beginner's luck while I had a pretty heavy dose of veteran gambler's luck. I managed to win a poker tournament at Mandalay Bay the second day we were there, the very same Mandalay Bay which began a series of unfortunate events that led to me being kicked out of the Luxor Hotel and Casino last time I was in town.

So we stayed in Las Vegas for 2 nights. There was a plan to stay for 3 but we were both pretty vacationed out by this point. I laid some money on my Super Bowl picks and we headed out to the Gold and Silver Pawn Shop that was the main reason for this whole trip anyway.

The pawn shop is a lot smaller than it looks on TV. None of the people you see on the show were working the day we went there. This was a disappointment to my brother who really wanted to meet Chumlee. They had some of the stuff from the TV show in the show room and a merchandise area that I have never seen on the show. My brother and I both picked up a Chumlee t-shirt and we went back to the car to bring the guitar inside and do some dealing. After standing in line behind a guy who was pawning his Xbox 360 for what I could only assume was drug money, we stepped up to and placed the guitar on the counter. The counter where we were at was the place where you usually see them paying people on the show for the items that have been brought in. It was really cool seeing the desk behind the counter where the old man sits. Long story short, the guy pretty much offered me the same amount of money for the guitar that I had bought it for. "I can't even get near the 2k you are looking for", he said. Discouraged, I took my guitar with me back home where it will no doubt lay in anguish for a while until it appreciates a little more in value. Fail.

So we left Las Vegas, headed back over the Hoover Dam and proceeded to drive to Tucson, AZ. The original plan was to stay in Tucson for a night, explore some of the things around there the next day and then drive back to Las Cruces for one final night. It turns out that we were so sick of driving that we decided to forgo the final night of our trip and just drive straight back to San Antonio from Tucson. This was hardly the scenic route that we took on the first half of our trip. Driving through the empty desert is certainly not as nice as driving through forested mountain ranges and plains. Luckily with these new fangled phones and cars, we were able to listen to hours and hours of uninterrupted music which definitely cut down on the mundanity (not sure if that is a word…) of driving 867 miles. We made it back into San Antonio around 8pm, only 13.5 hours after we departed Tucson. 80mph speed limit zones really help out on long stretches of road like that.

All in all it was a fantastic trip. Getting back out to the Grand Canyon and finally getting to see Meteor Crater were definitely highlights of the trip. My brother had a great time in Vegas. Don't get me wrong, I had a good time in Vegas as well, I just would have had a better time if I had got the $2000 I was hoping for at the pawn shop. At just over 3300 miles, it was a little bit less than driving from coast to coast. As much fun as it was retelling this story, you must absolutely stay tuned for my post about the adventure we experienced at the hotel in Williams, Arizona. It was nothing short of a debacle.

Ok, I am just under 3 full pages in Microsoft Word right now, better stop typing. This is by far my longest post on this blog yet and should make up for the utter lack of updates recently. If you actually read through this whole post then I applaud you for being able to fight through my incoherent rambling. Be sure to leave a note in the comments on if this post even made sense. Hopefully I will be able to get back to updating this thing with some kind of regularity.

And now for some keyword selection...

1 comment:

Unknown said...

me: Cumlee
is that a bad porn name?
Mike: lol should be chumlee
fixed it
but lol, yes, cumlee would be a bad porn name

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