Road Trip Day 14 - 2007-08-02

Check out a map of my journey today here:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&hl=en&geocode=&saddr=Flagstaff,+AZ&daddr=S+Entrance+Rd+%4036.037910,+-112.121990+to:Las+Vegas,+NV&mrcr=1&mra=pi&sll=35.605395,-111.914405&sspn=1.382242,2.581787&ie=UTF8&ll=35.66644,-113.395535&spn=5.523595,10.327148&z=7&om=1

Check out pictures from today here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10306971@N03/sets/72157601200193297/

This morning I left my hotel at 9:00 to head to the Grand Canyon. I hit a bit of construction-related delays that set me back about 30 minutes, but other than that the drive was fine. The Canyon was amazing, of course, so I took a bunch of pictures. Enjoy! (Because I'm sure you've never seen pictures of it before.)

After that, I headed out on my way to Vegas. I stopped at a nice diner called the Ranch House Cafe. It was a nice little diner out in the middle of nowhere in Ash Fork, AZ. I had a BBQ Beef sandwich, which was quite tasty.

I continued on my way and almost ran out of gas again. This GPS clearly doesn't have all the gas stations that exist, because it keeps telling me there isn't a gas station for 50 miles when there is one 5 miles ahead of me. That causes a great amount of undue distress.

Approaching Las Vegas, I went over the Hoover Dam. They are constructing a new bridge that is going to be pretty cool. I saw the supports that they have placed so far, and it is very impressive. (See pictures).

When I arrived where I was staying, New York New York, I was a bit confused. The appeared to have a taxi pickup area and a valet area, but no check-in area. I asked the valet where I should go to check in, and he told me the valet was complimentary. I didn't really want to valet anyways, because it would just motivate me to never access my car while I was there since I'd need to tip the guy who brought it to me and I was afraid I'd forget something in my car. I ended up letting him take it anyways, since it looked like that was what everybody else was doing and I didn't want to cause any trouble. Sure enough, I forgot my belt in my car so I'm going beltless! I'm not going to tip some fellow just to bring my car up here so I can get a belt out of my trunk.

After getting settled in my room, I went downstairs and signed up for the Player's Club to accumulate some comps while I play. I read somewhere that I could get $40 off my room if I played 5 or more hours of poker per day. Nice! So I grabbed a sandwich and sat down at a $2/$4 limit Hold' em table at around 7:00.

The table conditions varied pretty widely, but there was usually at least 2-3 people where were making tons of mistakes. I was up about $30 bucks at several points during the evening but managed to lose most of it near the end. My total profits: $1! Nice. Maybe I'll do better tomorrow.