Jailhouse Rock LIVE! (TheBucket is Baaack 5/14-5/19, Westgate, CCDC)

If that was at Holo Holo, that sadly was an upgrade since I went in September. JoB was 7/5 then.

Nice royal! Thanks for taking us along!

 

It was great to meet you as well! Next time I find myself in town solo, I'll have to give the bar dining you suggest a try. Hope your trip went well! I look forward to reading about it.

 

That's unfortunate to hear that the market for such things is dying off. I'm glad to hear that you got the chance to see him before his passing - my own experience has been entirely in the form of recordings.

 

It has been my pleasure. In fact, it has helped quite a bit to fill up some of the time on a solo trip like this that would otherwise have been spent feeling 'alone' as I experienced Vegas once again. It was fun to sit down at a bar and join in the conversation here at-will using my phone, knowing a crowd of interested folks of really diverse viewpoints and interests were with me the whole time.

 

Thank you! I'll try and do some clarifying/detail-filling posts in the next week.

 

I hope yours goes great, hopefully without any grabby weirdos at monofail stops. Unless you're into the grabby weirdo thing, in which case I'd recommend hanging out at the Westgate ticket kiosk. [emoji14]

 

Ummm yea that little bit freaked me out a little, not going to lie. I LOVE the monorail because its always so empty so maybe i wont use it solo after dark??

 

It was a good trip, thank you for following along! I think I didn't write my tale of the final evening in a wholly sensical (autocorrect tried to change that to 'sensual'... Now that would have been an odd style in which to write a tale of bartop VP play) manner. I'll add the necessary details soon, but in a nutshell I did lose some money overall, but came back with most of my bankroll intact.

Now that autocorrect got me started down that path... I think I'll try that when I have enough time. A 'sensual' rewrite of one of my evenings in Vegas, just a style change, no fact/event changes. That could be fun, and might even come out being pretty funny.

 

Well, my little adventure was in broad daylight with others around... I wouldn't let it stop you from using and enjoying it anytime (the one thing I wouldn't recommend is making the transition from the SDX bus to the SLS monofail stop late at night, I found that walk to be pretty sketchy.

 

Now, for the first of a few fill-in bits from my trip that were underreported or didn't quite tell the story due to my reporting being almost entirely on a mobile device. Now, with a nice computer keyboard at hand, it's time to fill in a few of those holes.

Let's start with my high-drama moment of the trip, my encounter with the really weird lady outside Westgate that wanted me to go with her to see Cher at New York New York.

I walked out of Westgate with a spring in my step, not knowing what the evening would bear, but deciding to head out south onto the strip, via the monofail, and see what my evening would bring. I walked out of the front doors, down toward the bell-desk storage area, and paused near a massive Westgate limo for a cigarette. I lit it as I leaned against a pillar in the entryway, directly beside an impressively long hotel limo. What would it take gambling-wise to be able to have THAT pick me up at the airport, I wondered? I moved on a pillar once I noticed a driver sitting patiently inside, my smoke blowing across the front of the car and quite possibly being drawn inside. I love the freedom to smoke that Vegas still brings to an unusual degree (not like it once was, but at least I can still get a smoking room), but I do my best never to wish it secondhand upon anyone who doesn't put themselves in that place deliberately (for instance, at a VP bar, I'll always ask permission to smoke if I arrived after someone beside me, but if I was there first, pack and ashtray prominently displayed, they knew what they were getting into). Anyhow, I moved one pillar closer to the monofail to relieve the limo and driver of my smoke, and enjoyed my cigarette, people-watching a bit as others strolled by.

For the most part, people were ordinary. As I generally do, when someone made eye-contact with me, I'd give them a smile and a nod, just a random gesture of recognition and respect that tends to go a long way in my experience. This happened a number of times. A family. A guy who walked with purpose. A generally lost looking gaggle of folks barely (if that) old enough to set foot on the casino floor. Some random older lady. A limo driver also stepping aside for a cigarette. It was a perfect scene for the entryway of a casino, one that I enjoyed the slideshow-esque nature of to a high degree as I relaxed against my friendly white-marble pillar.

Quite unexpectedly, someone from the slideshow reappeared. It was the older lady (she was one of those people who is difficult to judge the age of - I'm relatively certain that she was older than I (mid 40's), probably under 60. She walked up beside me and said something kind of random about how amazing it was that the trains had no drivers. Hmm. Ok, random lady wants to talk about the automation of the monofail. That's a conversation I can get on-board with on a moment's notice, so I delve a bit into the automation of transportation, trains in particular, and try to fill her in as to how that sort of thing really works. She seems quite confused by my patter, and repeats her original remark. A bit odd, but ok. I also got the notion that she was probably a bit drunk, but no foul there.

She made some small talk, and she made a couple of contradictory statements regarding where I was from and where she was from and where she was staying (mentioning Westgate as 'here', but seeming not to know exactly where 'here' was). This led me to a mild degree of concern for her well-being, but she seemed pretty lucid. She had also come from the monorail stop, and seemed to know virtually nothing about how to ride it. Oh, well, no biggie. I started to explain the virtues of buying monorail passes online rather than at the kiosks, and rapidly realized that I was going way too deep into Internet things for her to deal with.

Alas, it's late... I'll continue this bit of the tale soon. Stay tuned, folks!

 

Thanks for sharing your trip with all of us! Congrats on the wins too; sounds like you had a great time!

 

It has been my pleasure. Thanks for the congrats, and indeed I did have a great time. A bit tinged with sadness that this may have been the last trip of its kind for me (LV travel at no expense to myself besides gambling), but I indeed did have a great time. Best of luck on your next trip!

 

And now... To continue the extraordinary tale of my encounter with crazy monorail lady:

As I continued my ever-more-odd chat with this lady, she moved closer to me. And closer. And closer. Until we were pretty much nose to nose (offset a bit as I am rather taller). There's a certain weirdness to situations that violate one's personal space, and this was one of them. I'd like to think that I'm one of the people who has a reasonable sense of what level of personal space is expected in a certain situation, and when you're chatting with a stranger with tons of room on a broad concrete sidewalk in front of a major casino, that expectation is fairly large. This lady evidently had no sense of that. Irregardless (I worked for years with a man who had no sense of personal space and would get uncomfortably close for all sorts of casual conversation, so I was sort-of used to this and all her behavior served to do was remind me of him).

She wanted to go see the strip, and was staying at Westgate (contradicting herself a couple of times, raising my red-flag for BS... I've been quite drunk on a number of occasions. Hung out with quite a few folks under the influence on a number of occasions. And in almost all cases, however slurred the conversation might become, the basic facts of the situation generally become more consistent rather than more contradictory). In fact, the mere fact that she appeared to have come from the Monorail station, have no idea how to operate it, and claimed to be staying at Westgate and wanting to tour the strip (unless she came from SLS, she was closer beforehand)... It was all just too weird.

She asked how she could use it to get to the strip. I breathed a sigh of relief - all I had to do was show her how to buy a ticket and get on board. I walked her toward the monorail stop and kiosks, and she stuck her arm into mine. Umm, what? I also became immediately very aware of her arm being basically against the other side of my jacket where my bankroll sat in an inside pocket. Not an insubstantial sum, and thoughts of pickpocketing (I've watched a number of interviews with professionals, and making physical contact to distract the mark is a big deal) immediately jumped to mind. I disengaged my arm, told her 'no thanks', and proceeded toward the kiosks. I should have run away then, but I had offered to help her get on the train...

She took my arm again, semi-aggressively. I disengaged again. She did it AGAIN. I pulled away, and she made mention of being old enough to be my grandmother (mother perhaps, not grand unless she was spectacularly young-looking) and needing support. WTF. She was having no issues walking, nor aggressively making contact with me. She needed support in the same way that the Stratosphere needs me to go lean on one leg of the tower to make sure people are safe up-top. Again, my bullshitometer pegged out at the top of the scale. Did I walk away? I should have. But no. I consider myself a nice guy. A chivalrous guy. So I kept walking with her. At which point, she asks if my pulling-away is because I'm married. Guess what, it's not. If things had been 100x less weird, then maybe it would have been because of that. In the current circumstance? It's 100% on her. So she reassures me that her husband would be fine with it and that we should relax. WTF. Did I miss a 'psycho older swingers club' sign on my way out of Westgate? I don't think they have one of those. I really don't. Honestly, if she didn't weird me out from the get-go, I could have a fun conversation about that lifestyle over a couple of drinks. But even if I was 'up for that'... Not when there are 1483 octagonal signs pointing my way that all say, quite clearly, in all caps, STOP.

I have had the privilege of walking the streets of Las Vegas with precisely two women on my arm (not at the same time). Both were amazing examples of what a proper, fun, attractive lady with a long-term relationship shared with me should be. She was none of the above. Two minutes of weird personal-space invasion and let's walk arm-in-arm? I don't think so.

We arrived at the kiosk. This is when she brought up wanting to see Cher. And how I must think her to be super-old for knowing who Cher is. Umm... Nope. I'd hazard a guess that the average 20-something Vegas tourist knows at least in general who Cher is. She wanted to go see Cher, in fact, at Monte Carlo, that night, at 9:30 (a little under an hour away). This was barely possible, if one took the monofail to MGM Grand, pretty much ran to Monte Carlo, found a last-minute ticket, and got in during the pre-show activities. At that moment, I was determined to help this unfortunately friendly lady get on the train, get the %#* out of my life, and go see her show.

Then she asked if I'd come with her. Umm, no. No, I won't. At this point, I was done with random pleasantries, and answering in definite terms to make my position clear. It was way too weird, which I determined before we even started our trip to the kiosk, but at this point I was losing patience. I showed here how the southbound train could take her to MGM, where she would need to cross to NYNY, and offered specific directions to get to the MC from there. At which point she told me that she couldn't see the monorail map due to old age. WTF. If I were an older guy trying to hit on younger women out there... I sure as hell wouldn't play the age card. I explained it again. She needed my help to buy two tickets, one to leave, one to come back. She had a $10 bill. Tickets are $5 each. Ok. I ran the machine for her, took her tickets out of the drop-bucket, and handed them to her. She took my hand in hers.

I took my hand away. She mentioned how she was trusting a random man to take care of her (since when does putting $10 in a Monofail kiosk and handing a lady $10 in monofail tickets count as 'taking care of her')... Anyhow, I handed her the tickets and pulled away. At which point she grabbed my hand, quite forcefully. I wrested it away, and she ended up holding onto the cuff of my suit jacket. At the risk of several buttons, I yanked that away with some force, generating a cry of 'You hurt me!'. Oh, shit. Seriously, no. There is no Fing way I'm getting framed up as the bad guy in this scene. I walked away from her, rapidly but not running. I heard her call out "Hey, you! Hey, you!" behind me, and I just kept right on moving back toward the Westgate entrance. After a moment, I heard the monofail gate alarm sound - I assume that she had tried to enter the platform without processing her ticket properly (as the IKEA-instruction-like icons quite clearly demonstrate). I was 145% done with her s*!t. Back into Westgate I walked, thankful to be out of her weirdo grip, resentful of my strip-wandering evening being so rudely curtailed. But I wasn't going back out there... The last thing in the world I wanted was to end up on a Monofail car with her.

 

It was indeed at Holo Holo, and thanks for following along! Best of luck on your next trip!

 

Cool TR, thanks for sharing.

 

Great Report! Thanks for sharing it all. Well done.

 

22 black.

 

Great report and thanks for sharing! I was in town the same dates as you, but I never made it over to Westgate this trip. Thanks again for the detailed report with pictures. I don't see many trip reports from those staying at Westgate.