We arrived in Las Vegas Tuesday afternoon and hopped a shuttle to Treasure Island – sorry “TI” as it is now known. Brian remarked on the quality of the shuttle driver, who seemed to know all the shortcuts telling us that there are several LV properties on the strip that are causing a lot of construction headaches. We usually find ourselves the last ones off the shuttle for some reason but this time we were second – good thing too, since it was well over 90 degrees.
There was a short registration line at the hotel AND they had our reservation all ready for us. So far – so good; until we got up to the 30th floor where we found that our door lock was a bit temperamental. Fortunately, a nice lady from housekeeping was in the room next door and showed us some tricks to making the touchy lock-key combination work.
We were both hungry and decided to go back to an outdoor restaurant not too far from TI, but wait, now we had a temperamental elevator – or maybe it was just super slow; we waited well over 5 minutes before it showed up and we could go back down to the lobby. Somehow this scenario rang a bell with me.
[An aside]You would think that the 4 elevators that serve the 30th floor and only have to stop at 25-30 once off the ground, could run more often than every 10-15 minutes, but we’ve encountered the same issue every other time we’ve tried to go down to the lobby. Which is interesting in itself since there always seems to be an elevator IN the lobby when we want to go upstairs. I dunno.
So we walked over to Ba-Ba Reeba, a tapas restaurant we’d been to before and had a great experience. It was only around 5pm but, seemingly following in the footsteps of the sluggish elevator, we were now experiencing prolonged and uninspiring service. In fact, we almost got up and left before someone finally reminded the server that she had another table. In the end, there was good news; the meal was awesome, really awesome. We had a bunch of little tapas things that made me very happy and the sangria was great.
We went back to our hotel to await a call from our friend and Brian’s part time assistant Mike who had flown in with his Dad later in the afternoon. We met down in the lobby for two of the most expensive drinks I can ever remember ordering but then, free drinks only appear when you are gambling, which we were not. The drink coupons that were supposed to be good for a BO-GO, didn’t work out so well either. <Sigh> Vive Las Vegas!
Anyway, we decided to walk across the street to the largest Walgreens ever built as far as we knew. Except, you don’t just “walk across the street” on Las Vegas Blvd. – You need to go up an escalator, across a bridge, and then down another escalator to get where you want to go – it’s bizarre. Anyway, this Walgreens, which was NOT there in 2007 when we were last at Interbike, was a mall all by itself. It had EVERYTHING! We just wanted to buy water and Aleve but we were pretty astounded at the breadth of merchandise that had nothing to do with a drug store. It deserves a blog entry all to itself actually. So, we meandered back to TI, got in the elevator – immediately of course – and caught the last 15 minutes of the new NCIS. Oh it’s so good to be back in Vegas!
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