Vegas III: Getting there is 9/10ths the work.

Our 9pm flight to Vegas from Fargo on Christmas eve was already scheduled to be about 30 minutes late. That 30 minutes became an hour while we were waiting for the plane to arrive from Vegas. It comes time to board and something weird happens because all of a sudden people are no longer being allowed into the jetway. We wait several minutes and learn that something has gone wrong with the jetway and someone is coming to fix it. We finally get on the plane and our pilot informs us that we will leave as soon as the de-icer shows up and does it's job. That thing must have come from fucking Bismarck because it seemed to take forever for it to show up. We finally get rolling about 2 hours after our scheduled takeoff.

The first half of the flight was pretty smooth as my girlfriend and I were able watch some episodes of Arrested Development and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Somewhere over the rockies we start to bounce around a bit, but it doesn't get too bad until we land in 40-50mph surface winds in LAS. We grab our bags and hop on the shuttle to the new rental car emporium near the airport. They don't have the compact car I reserved, so they bumped me up to an 08 Chevy Impala - this is the only part of arriving that goes well.

The Chevy was a bit more car than I am used to and I caught myself racing down Las Vegas blvd at 70mph. We get to the Imperial Palace - both hungry and dead tired. The check-in line is about 15 deep and we decide to hit up the Teahouse for a quick meal. After chowing down my Eggs Benny I go back down to get in line. There is only about 10 groups in front of me, but I soon realize the line is moving so. fucking. slow. Someone would get up to a clerk, give them their ID and CC and all of a sudden that clerk would disappear into an adjacent office for 10-15 minutes. This happened with pretty much everyone who made it to the front of the line and was starting to piss me off pretty good after waiting an hour in a line that should take 10 minutes to get through. My girlfriend joins me in line and we finally make it up to a clerk. I give her my info and she tells me that they have no rooms left and that they need to put us up nextdoor at Harrah's. I understand that hotels overbook to ensure they are full, but there was no excuse for them taking as long as humanly possible to take care of everyone there.

We hike it over to Harrah's and get to a clerk immediately. It is 3am and we're both dead tired. He sets up the reservation for us, but when it comes time to give us keys their fucking keymaker goes dead and he tells us that we can either wait for it to start working again or they can call security to open our room for us. We ask for security who comes pretty quickly. We get to our room and the security guard opens it and someone's shit is all over the room - the numbnut Harrah's clerk gave us a room that was already occupied. I guess we're lucky we didn't walk in on someone getting blown by a tranny hooker. We go back down, get another room - this time with real keys, and finally get into our room. Sleep was in order.