Vacation Blog XI, Part 1: We head in search of luxury, and GaGa

Thursday, January 17th

Noon: I meet the wife at our dear friends' place to drop off the dog. They take excellent care of her and she loves it there; they just let her out into their backyard and she runs around like a lunatic until she can run no more. I will tell you, having a dog is a huge shift in our lives, but it would be bigger if we didn't have this place to drop her off. We are away for the better part of 5 days, and we can easily leave the cats at home alone for that long (to be honest, it's a vacation for them too!), but you cannot leave a dog alone that long, so it is really a Godsend that we have this resource for her. We really don't have to change our vacation plans at all, except when we are going somewhere that we can actually take the dog. Vegas is not that place.

3:00 PM - We arrive at our new favorite pre-flight hotel, Cedarbrook Lodge, for the evening. I am remarkably tired...in fact I slept most of the way down here while Tracey drove.

3:30 PM - Neither of us had lunch so we are heading to the bar for "happy hour" where we will enjoy some appies and wine. Just a little snack, and we are planning to have room service sent up to us when we are hungry for dinner. The food is just fantastic, and the wine is very good as well. We order a Marsanne from Washington State; Marsanne is a Rhone grape that is generally found in blends along with Viognier and Roussanne (for example, Le Vieux Pin's 'Ava'), but this one is all by itself, which is rare. It is quite tasty.

4:30 PM - Up to the room to relax for the evening. I am still remarkably tired. In fact, I may just lay down for another nap. TWO naps in the same day??

I hear the wife drawing a bath, so I know she'll be in there for a while. I am sure I will wake up for dinner.


Friday, January 18th

5:30 AM - Hmm. I slept through dinner, and in fact, slept for about 13 hours which could be a new personal record. Unreal. Woke up briefly around Midnight, and again around 4:30, but it was pretty easy to go right back to sleep. Guess I needed it. First thing the wife asks me when she is up is whether or not I am sick, because she has never seen me sleep like that when I am not. I am not sick, I don't think.

6:00 AM - The wife's alarm goes off and we are both up and getting ready to go down for breakfast. Our flight isn't until 10 but with the Government shutdown, we are going to get there a couple hours early to ensure no TSA-related issues. From what I hear, the lines at Sea-Tac have not been bad, but better safe than sorry, as they say.

6:45 AM - Down to the breakfast room where we fill up on their tasty wares. We know we are getting breakfast on the plane to no need to overeat here, but we want to have something in our bellies while we wait for the flight.

No issues at all with TSA (slightly longer than normal, IMO, but still no biggie). Our plane is a bit late arriving but we have no plans until 6 PM tonight so we are not worried about getting into Vegas a bit late. And when we get on the plane, everything was worth it. HOLY SHIT! We heard that Alaska was updating their fleet, and this new plane is GORGEOUS. Much wider aisles than before, wider seats, even in First Class, upgraded leather seats, new footrests...I could go on and on. Beautiful. Flying with these guys is always comfortable, and now it's going to be even better.

To make things even better, we get a wonderful lady taking care of us in First Class who could not be friendlier or more efficient, and our breakfast sandwich was one of the best I have ever tasted. As flights go, this was a 10.

After landing we get our bag and head to the Rental Car centre to pick up our car. We only rent from Hertz now, as part of their Gold Rewards program we don't have to do any paperwork at all, just hop in our pre-assigned car and go. We have to stop at the exit booth to confirm our identity and that's it, the whole process takes about 2 minutes. Very efficient!

2:00 PM - We arrive at Encore. We are staying in the Tower Suites and that gets us a special Valet, and a special check-in area. As if the regular part of Encore wasn't swanky enough.....this is next level. Our room isn't quite ready yet, so we drop off our luggage and head to the shops in the Wynn and then to La Cave for a quick bite and bottle of wine. The wine is from a winery we are familiar with - St. Supery - but the wine itself we have never seen before. It's a white Bordeaux-style blend which is really special. I can get them from wine.com for $30 and you can bet we will be doing that once we are home.  Our food, a Margherita pizza, is one of the best that either of us have ever had. The secret to this one, I think, is the addition of capers. It's fantastic.

Our room is ready and we head up to see the nicest room we've ever stayed in in Vegas; we upgraded to a Parlor Suite, a 1-bedroom suite with about 850 square feet of awesomeness. There is a massage room. That is not a typo. A massage room in our suite.

We wanted to be extra comfortable this trip as we plan on spending most of Sunday in our room watching football, drinking wine and eating whatever wondrous morsels we can get from room service. Going to be a really good day! Hell, it's going to be a really good trip!!

One of the cool features of this room that I have not seen before is, in addition to the obligatory mini-bar, we have our own fridge! That's perfect, as we are going to need somewhere to keep the white wines cold for our Sunday football-fest.

Into the car and we head down to Mandalay Bay for our dinner reservations at Aureole. We are a bit early, so we decide to head into their shopping area to kill a bit of time. This is not like the high-end shopping areas that we frequent so often, this one is a little more "for the people", you might say. We wander around a bit when we come across a pub with this sign in the window.

Even though we already had dinner reservations, I was pretty tempted to go in and order SOMETHING.

"OOOOOOOOOOOOO YEAH, THE MACHO MAN WANTS EXTRA GUACAMOLE WITH HIS NACHOS, DIG IT? OHHHHHH YEAH!!!"

Priceless.

5:25 PM - Our reservations are for 6 but we figure it's pretty likely they will be able to take us early, which is correct, except that the dining room doesn't open until 5:30, so they send us down to the bar until they open. It doesn't take long for them to come get us and take us to our window-side table. The place is almost empty at this point.

We have only eaten here once before, several years ago. We enjoyed it, and there is no reason that we haven't been back except that...well.....have you SEEN how many great places there are to eat in this town???

For appetizers we split two; a Caesar salad and short-rib ravioli. Both are sublime; in fact, I told them they are absolutely nuts if they don't put that ravioli onto the menu as an entree. It is one of the best pasta dishes either of us have ever had. Tracey had a beautiful chicken dish and I have salmon for my entree. Both are great; honestly, though my salmon was the least impressive thing we had. Not that I didn't enjoy it, but the bar was set so high by the other dishes that it paled in comparison.

We paired out entrees with one of the great Pinot Noirs we have had in recent memory, this little beauty.

This is a California wine, done in the traditional Burgundian style. They even go so far as to not mention the grape anywhere on the label, which is an Old World tradition, and very uncommon in the New World. It is very very special. I will do a full report on the wine we enjoy this trip in my wine blog once we are home.

The wine list here is extraordinary, and all of the wine is kept in a tower. In order to access the wine, they send a woman up on a trapeze. I am not making that up.

This place was on Wine Enthusiast's Top 100 wine restaurants in the USA in 2018. It really is fantastic, and a bonus: the wine prices are very fair. Sure you are paying restaurant prices, but there is no gouging here.  Highly recommend eating here next time you are in Vegas.

After dinner we drive down the strip a bit to Total Wine, to pick up our Football Frenzy bottles. We figure 3 bottles will be appropriate, and we get lucky and get helped out by a woman who really knows her shit...in fact, she just returned from working in the Caribbean, and before that she was a Sommelier for 8 years at.....AUREOLE!! LOL.

She recommends 3 bottles, a nicely aged Brunello di Montalcino, a Condrieu, and, because I asked for something off the beaten track, an off-dry Riesling from Austria. Looking forward to those!

8:00 PM - We are back at the hotel and Tracey makes a bee-line for the bathtub while I go down and play poker. I have to pay for this trip somehow!

11:30 PM - I am going to have to find another way to pay for this trip. Holy shit, that was the worst poker session I have had in years. Granted I don't play a ton these days, but I got my brains beat out for 3 hours. Went broke twice, on these hands:

KK loses to T6, on a flop of JT3, turn 4 (all the money goes in here and I am way ahead). River 6.

After a reload.....

TT in the big blind, I slow play it a bit and just call the button raise as we go heads up to a flop of 532 rainbow. He bets, I check raise half my stack. He calls. Turn is a 6. I shove, he thinks for a while and calls with 77.

River 7.

OK, so that's enough of that. Back up to the room to get some sleep, another big day tomorrow. Shopping during the day, and then LADY FREAKING GAGA!!!