Las Vegas, NV in November 2007

Ahhhhh.... Vegas Baby, Vegas!!! It wasn't too long ago that I was driving down The Strip thinking to myself "I gotta do this tour on foot" and sure enough opportunity came on knocking for this year's SEMA show. I quickly requested my last vacation from work, booked an award flight with Jet Blue and reached out to my California buddies for room to crash when I'm in town.

All this flying with Jet Blue paid off thanks to some award flights I accumulated. What better way to redeem it than on a Vegas flight. I've been checking various routes and the availability is great on Florida and Carribean routes but they are generally cheap when booked in advance, with Las Vegas and other West Coast destination availability is limited and typically the flights are expensive so I really lucked out to reserve the flights that I wanted. Got a chance to do a lay over in Southern California but was not let on a Salt Lake City flight I wanted to check out by going on stand-by. I got to buy my two year old cousin a little California stuffed bear at the airport to add to her collection, so far I've gotten them at every airport I've been to this year.

I got to give a lot of props to a lot of Internet folks that made my trip possible and more importantly less expensive. First and foremost I'd like to thank my buddy Ron from New Mexico for hooking me up with the SEMA passes. Ron unfortunately couldn't make the show himself and had his buddy Albert from Southern California give me the Exhibitor Pass which was really neat. Thanks to both of them! The lodging was generously provided by Chris from California the owner of www.ADTR.net. I've crashed at Chris's before and got a chance to hang out with his buddies but this was taken to another level. We stayed at the Wyndham Resort two blocks from the strip, close to the Las Vegas Convention Center for the SEMA show and close to everything else we wanted to do on the Strip. Hanging out with these guys was off the hook, we hit up a bunch of restaurants, casinos, strip joints, you name it. It was a blast.


Four days walking around the SEMA floor at the Las Vegas Convention Center really took its toll on my feet, they were killing me. I haven't exercised like this in a long long time. I got a chance to see a lot of different stuff I haven't come across before including some people I didn't think I'd ever meet in person. Steve Saleen walked past me by the cafeteria, Hulk Hogan and his son were signing autographs at the Nissan drift car booth, and there were a lot of hot looking models signing autographs on posters. I got a bunch of them signed for the contributors to my web sites, it was a good feeling to give something back.


I was supposed to pick up a rental car for the last three days in Vegas to do some sightseeing, but after my buddy Chris who was driving us around everywhere we went for the first few days got rear-ended by break checking some drunk in a casino parking lot I decided to not take any chances and cancel my reservation. I did end up getting the car for the very last day in order to get back to the airport and hit up the Las Vegas Motor Speedway one more time.


Although I wanted to walk the length of the Strip, after SEMA I just couldn't take another step that didn't lead towards something I could rest on, my feet were done! But we still ended up going to some great casinos. The most notable were MGM Grand where Chris's buddy Freddie got us into "TABU" lounge on Halloween night. We were dressed pretty casually, I didn't even bring any shoes with me other than the sneakers I was wearing but they let us in nonetheless and Freddie bought a few shots all around to get us going. On another night me and Freddie hit up the Venetian while everyone was gambling at Treasure Island. The eye candy walking around was outstanding, especially on a warm desert night. Afterwards Freddie again got us into "Seamless" strip club without any cover charge, that was a very entertaining night, especially for our buddy Chris. The last day in Vegas we hit Luxor to check out the Inclanaitor inside the pyramid and took the tram to Mandalay Bay for lunch at Raffles Cafe, the tres quesadilla's was outstanding as I rushed out the door to get to the speedway before catching a flight. I should also thank Big D, Nick's father and owner of Double D performance shop in California. He took us out on several occasions paying for dinners at Buca di Beppo's where Chris met his monster truck idol, and also at Margaritaville where Nick pulled a nice prank by dumping a double shot into Big D's margarita, it was great watching him get real drunk, real fast. All this mooching made me feel pretty bad about myself so I had to buy a round of fresh beer at Gordon Biersch one night. I'm not a big drinker but that stuff was outstanding, smooth and tasty.


Thanks to another buddy from New Jersey, JT or "Mango" as he's known on the Chrysler boards I got a free pass for the Richard Petty Driving Experience and a chance to go full speed in a stock car, NASCAR style. Of course after we had our last lunch at Mandalay Bay I was running super late and was afraid I'd miss my flight. I got to the speedway at 3pm... the flight was at 5pm and the line to the race cars was about 20 deep. I lucked out once again sweet talking some local ladies and they let me skip about five spots closer to the front of the line. The ride along was about 5 minutes total, but we hit 165mph average on the Oval doing three laps in all. Thanks again Mango for making this happen for me. I hit 100mph in my Mazda 3 rental from Enterprise, driving back on I15 South to MacCarran Airport.


I made the flight Okay, and before you know it was on the way to Long Beach, California. There I was planning to catch another flight on stand-by to Salt Lake City before heading to JFK but that didn't happen. Even though I had originally booked that route, Jet Blue bumped me off of it because they split the two flights and were now charging extra for passengers wanting to go on that route... since this was an award flight I didn't want to waste a penny on it. I ended up having dinner at the airport and doing a little shopping before boarding another plane and heading home. I arrived early in the morning, got on the NYC Subway and switched to a Jersey bound bus at Port Authority. It was a perfect trip!

Links:

Jet Blue: www.jetblue.com
ADTR: www.adtr.net
SEMA Show: www.sema.org
Seamless Club: www.seamlessclub.com
TABU Ultra Lounge: www.mgmgrand.com/nightlife/
MGM Grand: www.mgmgrand.com
The Venetian: www.venetian.com
Mandalay Bay: www.mandalaybay.com
Luxor: www.luxor.com
Gordon Biersch: www.gordonbiersch.com
Buca di Beppo: www.bucadibeppo.com
Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville: www.margaritaville.com