Trip Report: 12/10 - 12/13 - Day One

Saturday night after the trip, fighting off some Vegas Virus (all the symptoms are above the waist, thank you), the fiancé’s at a cocktail party…sounds like it’s time for a trip report!

We (Fiancé (god I hate that word, she’ll be known as D from now on) and I, both late 20s) hit the road around 11 am, maybe closer to 11:30, coming straight outa the Los Angeles Area, bitches (Burbank REPRESENT!). She’s on the downhill side of a cold, still dosing up on a few different pills. We put on “Vegas†by Bobby & Jeannie Bare, simply the best we’re-taking-a-road-trip-to-Vegas-that-maybe-we-can’t-afford song in the hemisphere, and the desert flies by.

We make it in to the (Las) Vegas Club around 3:30. Naptime. I know, I know, but she’s sick. She sleeps, I try to sleep. We leave the joint around five, and decide to grab a beer and wander under the Great Big Ol’ Canopy in the Sky. We walk down one side of Fremont and up the other. The Fremont Experience just doesn’t do it for us. I mean, it’s kind of cool, but…I don’t know, cheesy animations and cheesy songs are still cheesy, even if they’re huge and directly over your head.

Also, since it’s the end of the rodeo (and isn’t that the start of a great country song) there are two people in downtown: Cowboys and Fratboys. They have mechanical bulls set up inside of what looks like big inflatable pools. We see one woman do pretty well, and we applaud her effort. Good job riding a mechanical bull in downtown Las Vegas, strange lady. Good job indeed.

Eventually we decide to actually gamble, or I decide to gamble, and D decides to watch me gamble, due to a fear of losing hard-earned money. I suffer from no such fear. The Golden Gate will be the inaugural spot for this trip. We find a $5 blackjack table and I buy in for a little. There are two other guys there, middle-aged, both very nice, but both leave before long. This a bit disconcerting to D, who is a social butterfly and craves attention the way other people crave oxygen. Of course, I go on a winning streak and silently wish for everyone to go back to their ranch. Seriously, there were a lot of cowboys, and I grew up in Texas.

After a few minutes, a guy about our age sits down and buys in. Then a friend of his joins him. Then three more friends. D could not be happier; a table full of guys at her disposal. We all start talking; they’re college friends from U of Minnesota who have spread out around the country and are having something of a reunion. All of my mom’s family lives in Minneapolis, not that that has a damn thing to do with it, but I work it in to the conversation.

It’s an up and down session, and I put a few more 7&7s into my empty stomach. I’m feeling the love, and barely notice my money slipping away. I turn $60 into $15. Eventually we decide to go the Main Street Station for the dinner buffet. By we I mean myself, D, and the 5 guys from MN. We leached onto them like Rosie O’Donnell on a jelly donut. (Seriously, Rosie’s a dear, dear woman, a national treasure. God bless her for being joke fodder.) The seven of us hit the buffet, and hit it hard.

Time for an intro to the guys, I suppose. There’s Steve, Jim, Dan, Jason, and Spence, and if you knew how bad I am with names, you’d know how close we became over a short period of time. Steve was extremely boisterous, to the point that I could getting annoyed after see large doses of him, but it never got to that point, or even approached it. For example, crossing the street to MSS, he shouted “All White!†then proceeded to bound across the crosswalk, hitting only the white parts. See the cover of Abbey Road if you need clarification.

Jim was kind of the alternative guy, a little less mainstream than the others. Spence seemed to be a guy who had been sheltered until these college friends got him out of his shell. Jason was funny the way people who grow up on Midwest farms are funny, real dry, unassuming, deadpan sense of humor. Dan was a little socially awkward, in a way that made him a bit abrasive. But you could tell that he knew he came off that way, and he compensated for it well. They were all incredibly nice.

And so dinner was great. D & I felt like we were a part of this old group of friends, joking around and having a lot of fun. At one point we were talking about how D was the only attractive female in the place, but there was a blonde facing away from us, so we couldn’t be sure. So Steve (being boisterous and whatnot) decided to go talk to her, and the time was right, since the guy sitting with her was hitting the buffet. He goes and chats her up, reports back that she’s not bad, but pales in comparison to D (like we didn’t already know that). The rest of the dinner, her fella gives us the serious stink-eye. Good times.

And here’s where seven people’s brains shut down. We’re trying to figure out what to do next. Steve says they were thinking of going to “Jilly’s.†Jilly’s? What’s that? A cowboy bar? Ohhhhh, you mean Gilley’s. Hard G there, Minnesota boy. Sure, let’s do it. What could be wrong with wanting to go to possibly the most well-known cowboy bar in Las Vegas on the last Saturday of the rodeo? And how should we get there? Why, the Deuce, of course.

Bellies full and buzzes raging, we hurry down to catch the bus. Newfound friends, laughing and giddy, we all head to the upper deck. And sit. And sit. And…sit. They get off at the Stratosphere (their hotel. Our kind of (cheapass) people) and we sit. Three drunken twenty-somethings curse non-stop a few rows behind us, not even stopping when kids (as in seven-year-olds) sit near them.

It takes at least twenty minutes to get from The STRAT to the Frontier riding the Deuce. If you have a car or the $ to get a cab, I’d recommend it, because nothing kills a buzz like the Deuce. Finally we’re there, and oh my God, the line to get in to Gilley’s. Huge. Serpentine. According to the sign in front of the casino, there were cowgirls going wild in there, but I didn’t want to wait to see them. So we decide this isn’t going to work, but we’ll wait for our new friends and see what they want to do. We find a bench outside the front door and sit. And sit. And…sit.

At least this was more entertaining than the Deuce. The people-watching was delicious. We saw one cowboy threaten to break the neck of some other cowboy (and they were about to go at it), we saw a girl get hit by a cab (well, enthusiastically nudged, really. She was propelled back a couple of yards. No harm done), and we saw a lot of asses being grabbed. And do the pants really have to be so tight?

Finally the guys show up. We decide that Gilley’s ain’t going to happen. We wander around the Frontier, drop a bit at roulette, they want to go to NY-NY, and at that point we bail. I’m tired, D is literally sick and tired, and we catch a cab back downtown. We decide to meet up the next day (Sunday) to watch football.