vegas is a wrap, baby!

so, a quick vegas wrap up…

¡viva line vegas!

be prepared to wait. for everything. we landed, got down to baggage claim, got our bags pretty quickly and got on the shuttle pretty quickly. we got to the rental car plaza quickly. but with only five people ahead of us for the enterprise counter we still waited about a half hour to get helped. another forty five minutes in the garage when it was 117° outside. the last one got us upgraded from some toyota or hyundai piece of shit i never woulda driven into an audi q3, so there as at least that.

we got down to the cosmopolitan pretty quickly, only to wait for over an hour in a mammoth crowd of mask-free folks in the lobby to get checked in. but then they put us on the fifty-ninth floor, and while i regret not getting a pic of our suite, we got this for the view we walked in to…

so that didn’t suck at all!

two outta three ain’t bad!

while i’d tried to invite five or six couples to join us, various work and family and financial reasons arose where that didn’t happen. at first we still had three, but that dropped down to two by the time the trip rolled out, which ended up being okay. we only had one day with the ones that came from austin, and two with the couple that came from maui. great shows, great times, only one light booze buzz, and one severely heavy weed buzz, and all was great while we were there.

a few parting shots:

we liked the cosmopolitan because while vegas now has art pretty much everywhere, the cosmo is dripping with it. like this lady made of data cables. shit, they have obey art in the fucking parking garage. you can see more pics of all of this on my insta, @m_sean_m

while i (kinda) miss staying at the hard rock, mainly because it’s not nearly as trafficked or line-filled as the spots on the strip (re-visiting the “viva line…” thing from earlier, it was a half hour line wait for almost anything to eat or coffee or really anything there).

now this guitar is actually from the hard rock cafe, which was in the parking lot of the hard rock hotel and casino, and now lives in the neon museum in vegas which has bunches of old casino and retail and restaurant neon. the hard rock cafe was relocated to the strip, so a sign this big didn’t work. while the restaurant’s les paul made it to the neon museum, i can’t help but wonder what happened to the giant fender that used to be on the hotel entrance?

maybe it was just too big? they also have a show called “brilliant”, where laser technology is used to light us signage from casinos, restaurants, etc, that can’t be lit the old fashioned way…and it’s pretty damn convincing:

and then there’s the vegas vickie, who now has been fully restored and has her own cocktail lounge at circa:

and finally, a parting shot from the killer terrace of the suite we had, on the 59th floor, but from once the sun sets: