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I spent Easter weekend in Las Vegas with Chad, Mason and Dan. We were there to celebrate Chad’s last few months of bachelorhood. All in all, it was a very successful trip. Each and every time I go Vegas gets better and better. This time I managed to not gamble at all, which means all the money I blew was on booze and food.

I really wish I would have thought to use Twitter to log what we did. I’ll have to give you the rundown the old fashion way, from memory.

Thursday

We arrived in Vegas around 9:30, checked into the Flamingo, and started walking the strip. We had no agenda so we walked, and walked. We ended up walking from the Flamingo to the Stratophere. It was quite a hike. My feet hurt from the rest of the weekend because of it. A bonus though was seeing the Chapel of the Bells in the daylight. Other highlights of the walk included $1.99 24oz cans of Bud Light.

After the hike we sat down at a patio outside of Caesars. The weather was absolutely perfect all weekend. We had left Minneapolis when it was 17 degrees and trying to snow. The 80s of Vegas felt good. We were witness to a Vegas local pissing himself and being escorted away from the patio. 2 security guards and one cop came out of nowhere to direct this guy away.

That night we went to Gilley’s for good ol’ country music and bull riding. While I’m not a fan of the music, the crowd is always fun at Gilley’s. It didn’t disappoint this time around either.

Friday

Thursday was the most expensive day of drinking for the entire weekend for me. Which meant Friday had to be low key. We spent the day recovering from doing it up proper the night before by the pool at the Flamingo.

Friday night we went to Mandalay Bay to see the Spazmatics, and 80s cover band. The music and crowd were awesome, but without Courtney I didn’t do any dancing which was a bummer. Some other guys thought they were in a meat market instead of a concert, though, and proceeded to hit on anything that moved. I was blown away by their arrogance. I really didn’t think there were guys out there that would tail gals like these guys. They grade-A assholes.

Saturday

One thing I love about Vegas are the buffets. And you can’t go wrong with the Main St. Station buffet in Downtown Vegas. On Saturday we headed downtown to enjoy the buffet. We also stumbled upon an Indy car Grand Prix race. Well, we couldn’t really miss it because they were doing laps around Fremont Street. We stopped on a bridge to watch the cars fly by and almost were witness one of them hitting the wall.

For dinner Chad suggested we have steak. We went to a steak joint at the Imperial Palace. We were a tad underdressed (shorts and t-shirts and wreaking of booze) for the steak place. But regardless they let us in and we enjoyed a very romantic dinner between 4 dudes. Luckily there weren’t many other people in there. It got a little awkward.

After dinner we sat at a piano bar for the better part of the evening and enjoyed a little bit of a dueling pianos show. We watched a guy drop over $300 to hear the Michigan University fight song and some lousy 80s song. We ended back up at Gilley’s to polish up the night. Sawdust and Miller Light never gets old.

Sunday

By Sunday we were done drinking. We had to kill most of the day since our flight wasn’t until the evening. We spent the day by the pool again. I did manage to have the hottest Kung Pao Chicken I’ve ever had in my life at Ceasar’s food court. Once you get out of the midwest it seems the food has a bit more “flavor”.

The rides from the hotel all the way to Minneapolis were quite interesting, if not harrowing. I swear the cabbie that took us to the Vegas airport was drunk. We almost lost Mason when the cabbie pulled out in front of a speeding car. The flight home was bumpy, so bumpy as a matter of fact that the stewardesses were scared. We got tossed around a fair amount.

I did learn that Prince must be the official music of Las Vegas. I think we heard his entire music catalog over the weekend. And it just wasn’t one casino that we heard him at. Where ever we were we would eventually hear at least one Prince song. That includes when we saw the Spazmatics and the dueling pianos. Journey would be a close second after Prince.

For those who asked, our cruise pictures are available now online. The summary of the photos is: I took a bunch in Puerto Rico, a few in St. Kitts and then stopped shooting for the rest of the trip. So I only captured 3 of the 7 days. Here’s the trip summary:

We started off by spending two days at the Westin in San Juan, Puerto Rico. We arrived on Sunday. The hotel was great. Our rooms were gigantic 3-room suites. I would say the suite was just a tad smaller than our entire house. It was truly amazing. The Westin was tucked away, though, from the rest of San Juan so we really didn’t get out to see much of the city. We spent our time at the resort ordering 8 dollar drinks and eating ridiculously priced food. The food was so ridiculous that on Monday night I got sick from some sushi (see prior journal entry). While I wallowed in pain on Tuesday Courtney enjoyed some jetskiing on the ocean. She also managed somehow to get me on the boat later in the day.

The boat was cool but small. We cruised on the Radisson Navigator. It is supposed to be the second best cruise ship in the world. I would give it 3 out of 5. Our rooms were nice, but because of it’s size and the amount of people on it there wasn’t much to do. We pulled up next to a Royal Carribean cruise liner in St. Maartan. Our ship was half as high and half as long as the Royal Carribean. The first night on board took a bit of getting used to. You could feel the boat listing from side-to-side. This wasn’t good for Courtney and her motion sickness. Combined with my sushi situation we decided to call the night early and hit the sack.

Our first port of entry was St. Kitts on Wednesday. We ventured off the boat and walked parts of the town. It felt and looked much like Ocho Rios in Jamaica. Streets were dirty. Animals were just out walking around. Everyone was trying to get a buck from you for some reason. At one point I actually wondered why we stuck out so much like tourists…*cough*. In the afternoon we had a tour of the island on ATVs. Let me just say that the ATV was one of the most fun things I’ve done in a long time. I’m now trying to figure out how I can get one of ‘em.

After having a so, so experience in St. Kitts we thought that maybe our best bet would be to make our own fun on the boat. So Wednesday night we hit the town!….on the boat. We found the only bar open at 1am and spent the evening drinking away the minutes. So many rediculous things occurred that I can’t even do them justice. Plus, what good are drunk stories if you weren’t there?

Our prior night’s escapades made for a very late morning on Thursday. So late that we didn’t even make it to shore on Thursday to see St. Barts. We had a good time, nonetheless, sleeping the day away.

Friday we docked in St. Maartan. St. Maartan was a 180-degree difference from St. Kitts. It was clean and beautiful. Also it was owned by the Dutch AND French. We took a catamaran to a deserted island. Well, the island turned out to be populated with a few naked people. But they moved out of the way when we pulled up. Courtney and I snorkeled for a bit until we saw a gigantic nasty looking fish with teeth. Then we were done snorkeling.

St. Thomas was our Saturday trip. It was much like St. Maartan. More commerical. More american. Except that they drove on the left-hand side of the road with steering wheels on the left-hand side of the car. What a bitch to drive. We went to Magan’s Bay which is supposed to be the 8th most beautiful beach in the world. It was beautiful but I had had enough of beaches by that point.

Sunday we disembarked from the ship in San Juan. We had a short and sweet tour of some old fort in San Juan. Our tour guide was friendly, intelligent, and helpful but unfortunately most of us just wanted to sleep.

I left out some details here and there, but I think you get the general gist of the trip. It was good, fun, and relaxing. I need one every month.

Courtney and I got back on Sunday from a Carribean cruise which took us to San Juan, St. Kitts, St. Barts, St. Maartan, and St. Thomas. I won’t bore you with the drunken details. No one likes to hear stories of drunken debauchery. But I will tell you about the sushi incident.

Since I hadn’t yet figured out that sushi does not agree with me I decided to eat some yellow tail in San Juan the night before we boarded the cruise ship. An hour after I ingested the roll I was back in the hotel room dying. I wasn’t sure how the sushi was going to re-manifest itself. I did know that it felt like it was tearing apart my guts trying to get out. I ended up spending most of the evening in the bathroom on the floor. It took me to noon the next day to realize that I had the same reaction to yellow tail in Minneapolis a week before. Why must I be damned to only eat cheap lousy sushi from Lund’s?!

Incidently, I had to look up how to spell debauchery and found it’s dictionary definition interesting:

1.Extreme indulgence in sensual pleasures; dissipation.

If you are wondering about pictures, they’ll be up soon. I want to wait until I have my new web server up and running first.

We went shopping for shorts yesterday for an upcoming trip. I might as well just walked up to a brick and kicked it because trying to find shorts in January in Minnesota is impossible. Thank god at least one store, Mervyn’s, has total disregard for our weather. They had a couple pairs which would get me through the next couple of weeks.

I’m trying to decide between two things: a personal video player (for the plane ride) or a tread mill. The PVP has a very high geek factor. And it would be useful in many situations. But the tread mill is practical and healthier. I’ll need to ponder this a bit more before making a decision.