Two New Years in Two Cities Part 1

GOLDIE'S FIRST BIG TRIP

After 8 years, I finally retired my old Lincoln Town Car, Big Bertha. Big Bertha is still running well, but since I have my new one, Goldie Han, I decided to give Big Bertha to a friend. Big Bertha has over 287,000 miles and it seems that she can go on forever. Big Bertha is now tooling around in Hot Springs, Arkasas. I hope my new Lincoln Town car Goldie Han will be reliable as Big Bertha has been. Gary and I decided to drive Goldie Han to Las Vegas for our annual trip to Vegas.

The 9 days trip started on Saturday, December 28. Gary and I packed our car full of clothes, food and beverages. It was rediculous! We had enough food to last a month had we ran off I 10 and careened into a steep ravine away from rescuers's view. There were half a dozen winter coats and a combined total of 8 pairs of shoes along with luggages of all sizes.

We drove about 11 hours across a very windy Interstate 10 and stayed overnight in El Paso at the Holiday Inn El Paso which we got for $40 a night through Priceline.com. Three hours after we checked in, we had changed rooms a total of three times. The first room had a problematic key pad and it had one king size bed. We need two separate beds because we are too big men. The second room was fine until the people in the unit above us took a shower and water rained into our bathroom. We finally settled in our third room and proceeded to eat our hotdogs dinner made possible by our electric tea kettle.

PHOENIX

We left El Paso at 8 AM and drove to Phoenix. I have to warn all readers that if you drive across the southwest, you must have some kind of air freshener in your car. The moment we crossed into New Mexico, Goldie Han was filled with the stinky smell of cow manure. This is cattle country and for a full ten to fitteen minures, you will gag and choke on the smell. On this day, we were very lucky since the wind shifted and blew the smell away from all westbound travelers.

We arrived in Phoenix and it was quite eventful for me. I drove the whole El Paso - Phoenix route and after 7 hours, I got confused in Downtown Phoenix among the construction. I could see our " 3 Stars" hotel, the San Carlos, which I got from Priceline.combut getting to it was challenging since some of the streets in this area are no bigger than my driveway. BROKEN TILES

Priceline.com finally failed me. I paid only $50 a night for this "Three Star" hotel, but the San Carlos is not even close to a 3 stars hotel. A "Historical" hotel means that theit is very old, and despite "recent rennovation", it remains old. The San Carlos is such a hotel. Our bath room was tiny and very unpleasant to look at especially the bath tub. The tub was covered in titles that was obviously done by an amature that has never laid tiles or even watched a home repair show on the subject.

THE YELLOW SKIN

By tradition, Gary and I always eat the Da Vang (Yellow Skin) Restaurant. I had previously wrote that this is my favorite Vietnamese restaurant in the US and it still is. The moderately sized restaurant is on North 19th Avenue, about 5 miles from downtown Phoenix. We ate our favorite meal of Vietnamese hot & sour soup, fish cooked in clay pot and crunchy whole fried shrimp. We ended the meal with the tri-color deserts (che ba mau) to go. The sweet beans, jelly and coconut milk desert was wonderful and it washed away memory of bad fast food burgers that we endured on the road trip.

LIVE FROM VEGAS

Gary and I put on our sequenced jackets and saw Better Midler on New Year's Eve at Caesar Palace. I have seen The Divine Ms. M 4 times within the last ten years and I expected a little more from her show at Vegas. All the songs are there including the expected " Wings Beneath My Wings" & " The Rose". The show was pretty much the same as her various previous tours but this time it has many beautiful showgirls in costumes. Dolores the Mermaid, the Harlettes and about 17 showgirls did a wonderful synchronized number in full mermaid costumes. The show takes place on the same stage as Celine Dion's previous show at the Colosseum in Caesar Palace. Celine must have taken all the expensive and spectacular visual effects with her. Bette's show did not use any of the modern visual effects that Celine used, therefore, the stage was quite boring to look at. Any other show would have been fine, but this is a show that replaced Celine and it did not live up to the hype. We LOVE BETTE anyway.

FIZZLED ON THE STRIP Gary and I took our camcorder and set up shop on the Vegas strip at the corner of the Palazzo, Treasure Island and the Wynn Casino and broadcast live on the internet as the countdown to a new year started. What was to be an incredible annual fireworks displayed on the strip turned out to be a dud. For the first time in decades, the hotels were not allowed to shoot fireworks from the rooftop and had to do it either on street level or at a parking garage. This basically ruined the whole experience. Unless a viewer is directly in front of a hotel that had the fire works, the view was uneventful. We were close to Treasure Island and was able to see something. There were thousands of tourist and locals that saw nothing. In fact, our gold and blue sequinced jackets got a better reaction than the fireworks.

MISSING THE GREENS

With the exeption of a breakfast/brunch at Paris, Las Vegas, our food experience was not good. Our past experience steered us far away from our "home" at Harrahs's Las Vegas. Since the whole economy thing had gotten everyone worried, Gary and I jumped on the bandwagon for the sake of the economy and put us on a very strict budget. We either used coupons for our buffet and also took advantage of the 15 minutes rule. We would arrived to a buffet 15 minutes before the end of breakfast and by the time we are ready to eat real food, the brunch spread is available. This means paying breakfast price but getting the more expensive lunch or brunch fare. The savings is huge because the coupons (available through the hotels) took off about $5 and we save another $5 from not having to pay a lunch price. This time table is perfect for us since we usually gambled until the wee hours and wake up late. It could be that after a decade of eating in Vegas, I find the food boring. It did not matter if the buffet was at Imperial Palace or the very expensive Rio Seafood Buffet ($40 plus), they were not inspiring. Where were my cooked greens? Every vegetable dish was al dente or crunchy stir fried. I live in Texas and I need my cooked greens. Gary and I are also grits addicts and there was not a single good bowl of grits in Vegas. The grits were all cooked liked it was a soufle. I wanted buttery, and gritty grits and in Gary's case, (ala Britney) with cheese.