Adventures In Drunken Blogging, Day One

Actually that's not quite true, though I had a Bloody Mary on the plane and a Grey Goose + tonic with our late lunch/snack. Still, I'm chilling with a glass of Chardonnay in the room while Alan has a rejuvenating shower, so it may yet prove apt. Our adventures started before we'd even left Atlanta, after an eerily smooth, traffic-snarl-free drive to Hartsfield, a zero-wait time baggage check, a 10-minute wait to clear security, a short stroll to our very close departure gate - after all that going so extremely, uncharacteristically well, I didn't want to get on the plane because I was sure it would crash, things going well for me being a typical precursor to things going horribly, horribly wrong. I'll spare you the suspense and tell you our plane did not, in fact, crash into a mountainside.

While we were still in Atlanta - it's about 9:15 at this point - I went into a ladies' room. All the stalls were occupied so I was standing there sort of at the front of the row. A group of 3 - 4 ladies was also there, not in line but waiting on their friend(s) to emerge. Suddenly, into the ladies' room boldly strides this self-important silver-haired geezer, yammering away on his cell phone! An involuntary exclamation of "Dude!" escaped me because septuagenarian gentlemen are NOT welcome in the ladies' restroom. He didn't pause, either in his stride or his conversation, except to throw me a rather annoyed look. I'm sure he was thinking, "Kids today, and their horrible manners! Can't she see I'm on a call?" Well, he should have listened to me because as he stalked deeper into the ladies' room, this mother with a little girl (3 or 4, maybe?) shrieks and then SCREAMS at him, quite hostilely, "You're in the WOMEN'S ROOM! GET OUT!!!" Geezer paused, looked around momentarily confused (I should add, descriptively, that he is wearing a pair of very dark sunglasses, I presume in a vain attempt to prove what a hep cat he is, because after all, it is so very bright inside the airport) - then he made a U-Turn, strode self-importantly from the bathroom, yammering into his cell phone, "I'm in the women's restroom! I walked in to the women's restroom here!" Alan was waiting for me outside and was looking that way just as Silver-Haired Yapper stalked out, reportedly still blabbing about walking into the women's bathroom. Alan was (as he described it) "just standing there in a cloud of "What the hell?!?" until you emerged and clued me in to the doin's."

We continued down to our gate and found that there was a restaurant just opposite, so we went across to get a breakfast biscuit and a Coke. By the time we sat down, Silver-Haired Yapper was already there, about 1/4 through a pint of beer. Almost the whole time that we ordered, ate our breakfast, paid our tab, walked across to the gate and awaited our flight, he was sitting there drinking beer. He was only doing this "almost" the whole time because he kept going to the bathroom. Don't get me wrong, I understand that the emptying of the bladder is a natural consequence of the beer ingestion, but he was going to the bathroom A LOT. We noticed him the first time and were joking about whether he'd choose the men's or women's room, and after he kept going over and over, we moved on to the obligatory Larry Craig jokes: "What, no takers? Bah, I'll try again in a few." Dude was hopping up from his table like every 3 minutes - and honestly, if your bladder can't hold out for at least 10 - 15 minutes at a stretch, should you really be guzzling the brewskis? Don't even get me started on what kind of person needs to drink at least five beers before 10:00 AM on a weekday - and that was after we started counting.

Silver-Haired Beer-Slammer is, of course, on our flight, seated a few rows ahead of us. I tried to see what he ordered to drink but I was aisle-blocked. I can tell you that every chance he got (which was off and on because we had some turbulence) he was hopping out of that seat and going to the bathroom. The one time Alan went to the restroom on the plane, guess who was standing in the aisle waiting impatiently for his turn? Go on, guess. Alan wanted me to add that he never took his sunglasses off the entire time, not in the airports, not on the plane (and we presume, not in the bathroom, though I can only vouch for one visit).

Things continued to go atypically wonderful for us: we boarded in the first group, we were seated in a row to ourselves (no fat smelly stranger snoring and sweating on me) and there was not a single child on the entire plane. No crying infants, no fussy toddlers, no screaming youngsters...imagine: an entire plane full of polite adults who listened to movies/music at respectful levels, who kept cell phone conversations private, who offered others their newspapers and magazines when they'd finished...it was heaven at 38,000 feet. We were seated toward the back of the plane, so when the stewardess got to us for lunch service, she apologized that she only had two meals left, and the rest were snacks. The two meals? A chicken parmesan/mozzarella pesto panini, and a fruit and cheese platter - which were the meals Alan and I (respectively) wanted from the beginning on viewing the menu! Things were going so well, it was downright Twilight Zone-ish. I'm still stunned that I landed alive.

After we had deplaned at McCarran, I had a tense moment (because I had been waiting for about five hours for something to go terribly awry) when bag after bag after bag appeared on the carousel, but our luggage did not. It did, eventually - so cue worrying about horrific traffic accident on Tropicana en route to the hotel - and we got here, they had not lost our reservation, and our room is FANTABULOUS. We got a suite this time (admittedly, one of the smaller ones at Mandalay Bay) but scrumptiously luxurious and huge and wonderful to us all the same. Here are Flickr pictures - eventually of our whole vacation but right now, just our suite and a pretty fountain.

We unpacked, grabbed a snack and wandered around a bit, checking out menus of restaurants we might want to eat at for our Big Fancy Meal, visited The Reading Room (small, cozy bookstore - hey, those of you who know us personally know for certain that Alan and I could be in Paris, Turks and Caicos, the Aran islands or Hong Kong, and the first thing we'd do would be go to a bookstore). Don't lose faith, though - we gambled a wee bit, too. I spent $5 on quarter slots and didn't win anything, then spent another $5 on dollar slots and won $64! W00T! Okay, high rollers we are not, but I am perfectly content to win a little here and there, giving us a bit more to spend. I probably won't ever win $100,000 in one roll of the dice, but enough of those $54 profits ($64 won less $10 invested) can add up to some pretty decadent dinners!