Recap:: Vegas

Let's see.. Thursday morning we left our house around 4:15 am to Harrisburg Airport to catch our 6:30 am flight.. off to Cleveland for our connection for Vegas. All went well.. no plane issues, though flying gets so boring! Luckily on the way out we got breakfast and watched Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and then other various comedies like The Office. We arrived in Vegas around 10:50 am. Off to baggage claim, then to the Taxi line and onto the hotel.

Once there, i changed clothes and made a poor decision to wear heels.. walked over to the convention center in the rain (with an umbrella but still) and spent a good 30+ minutes just trying to find the booth. Kohler had a huuge booth that was in front of ours.. huuge. I spent the rest of the day at the show. Alex got lost in the rain on the Vegas strip.. i shouldn't say lost, more like turned around. He wanted to find some beer place and eventually got there, by cab i think. That night we went out with some of the guys at the show, very fun group! We went to Gordon Biersch Brewery.. delicious beers and food. Afterward we headed back to the hotel, I went to bed.. Alex stayed up with the guys for a few more drinks. I learned my lesson at the first trade show I ever went to.... just go to bed, drinking is not a good idea when you have to wake up early....

The next morning, I had breakfast at the bar in the hotel and then made another trek to the convention center, luckily it was sunny out on Friday. The show was from 9:30-2:00 with breakdown to follow. The last day of the show is always slow... in this case, extremely slow. And the chairs there were very slippery so it was hard to sit without extra effort. At 2:00 we began breaking down.. we took down the large background display and moved some other stuff around. The thing about trade shows is, you have to wait for the crates to come out to pack up. There's no telling when the crates will arrive. My coworker Dave decided to stay behind and wait for the crates because he was catching a Red Eye that night and had no where to go anyway. He let me go have some fun in Vegas since Alex was around and he didn't want me to waste time sitting there with nothing to do. He had his laptop so I'm hoping he maybe had some stuff to pass the time. After I left I relaxed in the hotel for a little while, then headed to the Mirage to meet Alex who had been playing in the poker room there. Then we decided to take a walk down the strip to see what's what. We walked and walked and walked and walked.. we stopped at the Monte Carlo restaurant The Tap, where we got 2 for 1 beers and an appetizer. We walked some more.. I lost $50 in black jack.. Alex won some in slots, just a little as we're both pretty anti-slots.. We really couldn't figure anything out to do, our feet hurt and we were extremely tired. We decided to go back to the hotel to rest then come out again for dinner later on. That didn't happen.. we ended up going to bed around 10. I blame jetlag :)

Sunday morning we woke up to be at the convention center around 8:00 am to pack up the rest of the booth. We finished in about an hour and headed on our way. Back to the hotel for breakfast and up to the room to get ready for the day. We watched the end of Meet Dave and then showered. Took the tram to MGM Grand and some other trams to get to Mandalay Bay. I guess we were hungry again at some point after all the walking so we stopped for lunch at a noodle house in the casino. mmm very good. afterward we put $10 on red at the roulette table for my mom.. lost it.. then played some poker in the poker room there $2/$4 limit texas hold'em.. of course we were playing with some beginners. A friend was teaching 2 friends how to play.. this meant that his friends didn't know they should fold a 2 4 or a 7 2 or had enough sense to just fold instead of calling. I know it's only 2 or 4 bucks to call but still... it messed up a lot of my hands to them 'should've been' folding. Regardless, I won the last hand we played there for $100 and that helped me break even. After our poker fun we wanted to go to a beer store for Alex so we took a cab outside the city to Lee's Liquors. Alex found some great buys and we caught another cab back to the hotel. We shared some brewski's and relaxed until heading out to dinner.

We walked to the Tram and took it to MGM again.. luckily that's where our restaurant was. It was Diego, which is a mexican restaurant.. authentic actually. We had some awesome food and some good conversation with a couple that sat by our table.. they were from Texas and told us this is the most authentic mexican food you can find in Vegas. We were satisfied with that. After dinner, we walked around a bit and decided to head back to the hotel.. we had a flight to catch in the morning.

Our first flight went off without a hitch.. we ate breakfast in the terminal and had a 5 hour plane ride to Philly. Our plane landed 10 minutes late and the gate wouldn't attach, so that set us back another 20 minutes. We arrived in Philly at 5:00 and our connecting flight to Harrisburg was at 5:30.. boarding started when we landed. We got out of that plane at 5:20 and booked it from gate C to gate F.. that means riding a shuttle, a sloww shuttle at that. Needless to say, we ran through the airport and didn't make the flight.. it had left 10 minutes early. Damn US Airways.

At this point we're seriously out of breath (or i am) and sweating profusely (or i am) and we aren't sure what to do. Not one person at any of those desks said, "Oh what happened, you missed your flight, what can we do? do you want to find out when the next one leaves?" etc. They basically just had the "oh that sucks for you" look on their faces. We had to ask all the questions.. where do we get our bags now? when's the next flight? where can we catch the shuttle to the train? where do we go to get refunded for the flight we didn't make and don't plan on taking?? how long does the shuttle to the train take? when does the next train leave for lancaster? Lots of questions we asked.

We ended up not getting the ticket thing figured out, they gave us an email.. or as i call it, an open forum to bitch them out about their poor customer service. I mean, we got off the plane and had the gate call the F gate to hold the plane for the 8+ passengers that were trying to connect but never made it.... that's not customer service. I'm looking to get the whole flight refunded, including the one from vegas to philly.. they should be able to handle that. We did find out that our bags would fly to harrisburg on the next flight.. they couldn't pull them (from where ever they were sitting at that moment (on the tarmac) for some reason, though they should've known exactly where they were.. it's called, computer systems) anyway, we decided to take the train to Lancaster but first we had to take the shuttle to the train station. Let me tell you, we cut it close.. as we walked down the stairs to the loading dock the train guy (idk what they're called) was calling 'all aboard'.. we would've been really really mad had we missed the train too.

We got home and greeted the kittens, we found pee on both couches with some #2 in there as well.. apparently there was a litter box problem. But we put on the fabric cleaner and then Alex's parents came to take us up to Harrisburg to get our bags and my car. Luckily when we got there, the plane that had our bags was landing in 15 minutes. We waited and thankfully got our bags, got the car and left. So happy that it was all over with. Not to mention we hadn't eating anything since 8:00 am west coast time because US airways doesn't feed you on the plane.

We're thinking for future trips we might as well walk to the train station, take the train to 30th street, hope the shuttle to the airport and forget about the whole car situation to save time and money.

Overall it was a good trip, I don't count our misfortune at the end against the fun we had in Vegas. I will say that i'd probably spend no longer than 4 days there on average, especially in the winter, there just isn't enough to do on a low budget. Summertime at least you can sit out at the pool. Maybe we'll see you again someday, Vegas.. but probably not anytime soon :)