Vegas Without the Poker

 I dropped Amy off at the airport on the 20th, she was headed cross-country for a big long six-month Appalachian Trail thru-hike, so I was going to be emulating a bachelor for a while. 

What do bachelors do? A guys' weekend in Vegas!

Austin turns fifty this year, and his brother-in-law was going to be at a conference in Las Vegas anyhow, so a gang of us went out to join 'em. 

The novelty of this trip started closer to home for me-- I'd wound up with a fairly inexpensive fare on JSX, bolstered further by a rebate from my credit card, so I would be getting in a day late and miss the hike out to Red Rocks and some supercar track laps, but I'd get to try semi-chartered jet service. 

There were many things I liked about this. One, the cabin layout means I can arrange to have nobody sitting next to my wide shoulders. On the way out, the layout was one person on either side of the aisle, with a table next to the person on the starboard side of the aisle. 

Another was where the terminals are. On the Denver side, JSX flies out of APA/Centennial Airport, which is a lot closer to home than DEN/Denver International Airport. A Lyft rideshare each way was a lot cheaper than parking out at DEN, too. On the Las Vegas end, they fly into McCarran just like everyone else, but their terminal is on the other side of the airport from where the commercial service terminal is-- so instead of an expensive taxi ride to the Strip, you're already there, down by Mandalay Bay. 

The terminals also worked (mostly) a lot better than mainline commercial service. Since the TSA wasn't being paid at the time, many agents were quite under the weather and calling in sick. Must have been poor nutrition from not being able to eat well or something. Security lines at DEN were well over an hour long. Since the JSX terminals handle their own security and do it a single plane at the time, they said don't bother showing up more than 30 minutes early. Since I can't help being early, I was there 45 minutes early and they weren't yet ready to check my bag. They weren't kidding. 

Some other side benefits-- the way they're set up, they work well for traveling with pets, so I shared the terminal with a whole lot of dogs. Flying out of the small airport on the home end also meant I got to see interesting airplanes as we taxied out to the runway.

I said mostly, and there were two drawbacks. One is that even with the nice cabin layout, the Embraer 145 is still a Really Small Airplane. The layout meant that I was able to sit in the seat without turning sideways half the flight, but my brother simply wouldn't have fit because the ceiling would have been too low for him. The other was that even though Vegas is their hub, their terminal is still quite small. If things get backed up or delayed, the terminal gets crowded in a hurry. 

After a short flight, I landed in Las Vegas around noon. I was willing to catch a rideshare out to Speed Vegas, where Mark and Austin had been driving a Porsche GT3 and a McLaren 570 around their track and all of us were going to race go-karts, but the gang was ready for lunch so they picked me up on the way to a barbecue joint that had been recommended to Austin at a poker table.

The barbecue was pretty good, but nothing to write home about, so I won't. 

We swung by the Pinball Museum for a bit before our go-kart track time. They added some new historical exhibits to what had mostly just been an arcade full of ancient machines, most of which you can play. I appreciated them, though most folks preferred the living history.

I didn't get any decent pictures at the go-kart track because I was go-karting rather than taking pictures, but they did email us results. The results were surprising. At 300 lbs, I outweighed the next heaviest of us by around a hundred pounds. Karts don't have to be powerful because they don't weigh anything-- but I sure do. Rental go-karts are usually on the order of 300 lbs, I'm another 300, so the total weight is around 600 lbs. Everyone else is closer to 500. High school physics class tells us that F=ma. 

Racing is all about 'a', or acceleration-- and not just getting up to speed. From a physics perspective, cornering is also acceleration, as we're changing the direction of our travel vector. If we assume F is constant because the go-karts are identical (this isn't completely true, because my extra weight does get me a little more traction-- but not enough to offset how much my weight wants me to keep going straight while I'm cornering, so it's still a reasonable approximation), then to maximize 'a', you want to minimize 'm'.  My extra 20% of mass means everyone else has 20% more acceleration than I do. 

Here's the results of each heat:

SpeedVegas ranked by fastest lap, and every time Mark had us all covered both for fastest lap and average lap-- though only just barely in the second heat. He was less than a thousandth of a second faster than I was in heat 2-- those lap times are identical to the precision shown here. (It's also possible that that's as precise as the measurements are and the tiebreaker was average lap time?)

Somehow I was second in every heat-- it seems I remember a little something about car control from a lot of years as a mediocre autocrosser. 

Curtis had waved off the third heat because thrashing karts after barbecue wasn't necessarily our best idea ever (and the other kinda heat probably didn't help), and after heat 3 I wasn't champing at the bit to buy more track time, either-- my stomach was starting to get queasy as well. We packed up and headed on back to the ranch-- and what a ranch it was. Turns out that when you're splitting it five ways during the off-season, you can get a penthouse suite for about what the local Hampton Inn would have cost.

The suite had a hot tub at the edge of the balcony. It had a multi-arcade machine, a pool table, and just in case you didn't get enough downstairs, a blackjack table without a complete deck of cards. (None of us are playing with a full deck anyhow, so...) It also had an Elvis pinball machine, but one of the flippers was broken. As it turns out, one of the showers couldn't maintain a temperature-- turns out one of the factors getting the price down was some deferred maintenance. Still, not a bad setup.

Angelo took us to dinner at Raku, which is a Japanese small-plates joint that focuses on chicken. I didn't know that chicken was the focus at the time, so I went off-script by ordering "Raku's Tofu" as one of mine, figuring if they name the dish after the joint there must be a reason. It was excellent. I also had the Saboro Don, which was just billed as "Seasoned ground chicken" in the Rice Dishes section, which strangely put me in mind of laab gai when I read it, so I had to try it. As expected, nothing at all like laab gai, but really excellent. 

We wrapped up the night by heading to a Cirque du Soleil show, this one the Michael Jackson themed one. It felt less Cirque du Soleil than the other few that I've seen-- in part because I could sort of make heads or tails of some of the plot. My favorite bit was tumblers who were choreographed well with "Smooth Criminal", and was a bit disappointed that they hadn't managed to shoehorn "Thriller" in there, even if zombies would have been out of place. 

I was up earlier than everyone else and tried to make coffee, but was not sufficiently awake to realize that the coffee that housekeeping had left us was for a single-serve machine but I was trying to use it in a 12-cup rig. That went... poorly. After some of the rest of the gang got up, a few of us headed to the Starbucks next door, which worked a lot better.  Mark then made migas for breakfast in the suite's kitchen, which were excellent. 

With the rest of the gang, I finally made it to the Atomic Testing Museum on this trip (I've been meaning to for ages, but I keep being a degenerate playing 4-8 out at The Orleans.) They were running a special exhibit on Fallout, and had shoehorned some Fallout artifacts among their usual exhibits-- a Vault-Tec bobblehead up on a rocky area, a Grognak comic in with other books and pamphlets pertaining to the 1950s and 1960s' views of the Atomic Age. I enjoyed both parts of the museum, both the reality and the shoehorned-in fantasy. 

Lunch was at one of my favorite joints, a tiki-themed dive bar called Red Dwarf. Our timing was good, as they had live music-- good live music-- delivered by a surf band called Thee Swank Bastards. The reason I like the place is they've got the best Detroit-style pizza you'll find outside of the Motor City. There weren't very many people in the place when we got there, so the lead guitarist, freed from his amp by modern wireless technology, came over and played there at our table for a bit. That was fun to watch-- I really like electric guitars from a science and engineering perspective, even though I have zero musical talent.  It seemed to be particularly fun for Curtis, who actually is a guitarist. 

We took Mark over to where he was staying for the conference, and the rest of us went shopping because there was a particular required chocolate that can be found in few places, Vegas being one of them. I didn't get a picture, so I can't remember the details (aside from we were in the malls attached to the Venetian). It was good chocolate, but as you've probably noticed from the rest of this paragraph, I am not a chocolate guy. :)

Austin split off to get in some blackjack, and the rest of us headed back to the ranch to chill. The sun had gotten to the other side of the building again, so the hot tub was pleasant and not blinding. Angelo and I also found that we're both not particularly good at pool, but I might be worse. Dinner was at the korean joint next door, and it was right up my alley. As much as I enjoyed Raku, I was glad we'd hit this place. It'll need to go into the rotation for future Vegas trips. 

The next morning was mostly chill, as Curtis, Angelo, and I had to head to the airport at various times-- Austin was hanging around to play a WSOP Seniors poker tournament, where you had to be 50 to sign up and it started on his birthday, so he was the youngest person in the field, but the rest of us were headed back to reality. 

My plane was delayed by a few hours, and I think I may have wound up on different hardware, because this plane was two seats on one side, one on the other. Flying solo, I still wound up on the one-person side, which is good, because regional jet seats aren't any bigger than long-haul planes. When I eventually got back to APA, I requested a Lyft, which got directed to the wrong place. I'm not entirely certain how I managed to sort that out since the driver spoke no English and my Spanish is horrendous, but we narrowly avoided me getting declared a no-show.