Las Vegas

Tuesday, 1 March 2011

Last week i flew to Las Vegas with Karrie and her mom. We stayed at Imperial Palace which is right in the center of the strip.

The last time there i walked the whole time because it was 80 degrees. This time it was around 50 so we rode on the monorail. I never knew that Las Vegas had a monorail but it was great, you could make a 2 hour walk turn into a 10 minute monorail ride.

The first morning, while waiting for everyone to come down to breakfast, Karrie went to get a new players club card. They give you a book of coupons to use and one of them was half off breakfast. I signed up too and since i was getting a card for the first time i got $5 to use in their casino. I figured i would lose it in about 3 seconds.

We walked around a bit and Karrie said i could always try a slot machine. After playing for about 5 minutes i won $4, i was pretty happy. Still waiting for them to come down, Karrie suggested i try a one dollar Wheel of Fortune game.

After 4 spins i was down to the last dollar, but luckily the 3rd dial stopped on "Spin" which meant i got to spin the big wheel at the top. Karrie said "The least you'll win is $20." I was very happy about that because it would pay for breakfast. So i pressed spin and waited for it to land on the 20 or 30 or maybe even 35. It ended up landing on the $1000.

The good news was that i won a thousand dollars, the bad news was that Karrie said "way to go Dave, now you get to pay for everything we do for the rest of the trip." Rightfully so i guess.

I would highly recommend winning a thousand dollars your first morning in Las Vegas. It makes the trip more fun knowing that you are coming home with more then you left with.

Besides winning hundreds of dollars there's a lot of other stuff we all did. We went to see the Price is Right Live show. It was fun, there was around 300 people in the crowd and they called about 50 names in total. They didn't have as good of prizes as the real show that John and I went to but it was still pretty good.

With the monorail passes we went to MGM, Slots of Fun and lots of places in between. We also rode the roller coaster at New York. I was planning on taking pictures during the ride but just as we were about to go up the first big hill the ride stopped and they came out and took my camera away. It was a good thing they did because i would have probably dropped it. The ride was way faster then it looked. I was holding on with both hands the entire ride. It was a lot of fun.

The last day we went up in the Eiffel Tower at the Paris casino. We happen to be there at 5pm and got to see the fountains at the Bellagio.

View to the south.

View to the north.

View out of our hotel room.

The Venetian hotel.

View north from New York.

A typical visitor to Las Vegas.

comments | | Read More...

Random Pictures from 2010

Thursday, 12 August 2010

I didn't feel like creating separate post for all of these so i just put them all together. They are some of the random things i've done in the past few months.

This was a smoke stack at one of the GM plants i visited last month. It was either in Dallas or Kansas City, i can't remember.
Waiting to fly home in the rain.
Truck frames at one of the GM assembly plants.
Good luck guessing what book this is. Although if you know me you probably have a good chance at guessing it. Katie will probably know since it's her book that i borrowed.
Unfortunately some animal has been eating the tops of almost all my sunflowers. I started with 20 and i'm down to 4. It is not going to end happily for one of us.
Tigers game
Fireworks afterwords
Washing the cars and watering the driveway
Somebody's cookin' chicken
Grandma and Jack
Some pictures from the Toledo Zoo.
No those weren't my footprints, honest.
This lady didn't see that part of the road was missing. She was too focused on that Big Mac.
Just trying to fit in at the LA Dodgers game.

Before going on the Price is Right they take your picture in front of this green screen where you can select different backgrounds. They give you a card then try to get you to buy the picture afterwords. I just saved the proof from the site. Now John and I didn't see a lot of other dudes going up there and i didn't really want to go. It was weird. But whatever, glad i did.

comments | | Read More...

The PIR

Sunday, 20 June 2010

As i had said a few weeks ago, my buddy John and i were on the Price is Right in LA.
The reason why we didn't get to sit together is that we showed up at 8:30 and we were just about the last people in the studio, out of 316 people we were 309 and 310. We lucked out and barely made it. So when we walked in to the studio they split us up. John went to the right, got screwed and had to sit in the last row. I went to the left, somehow lucked out and sat right up front behind contestants row.



Here's me telling the contestants what to bid. If they would have listened to me they would have won every time but once. For example in this picture i was telling her to bid $1000. The winning bid...$1000.
Here was the funniest part of the show, when Roy got up there and bid $200 for a wicker chair. It ended up being $1400. It was the worst bid. Drew even joked around during the commercial with his family on how bad it was.
John in the back row surrounded by all the people in red shirts
Some quick things to know about the show:

• they film 2 shows a day but to be sure to get on the show you should probably get there before 7am. then in our case they said they had 50 empty seats for the second show and people could stay in their seats and see that too

• before you get to be in the audience you have to sit/stand for hours in 2 different lines, where you hold colored tickets with numbers on them. for example they might say "ok i need all the people with blue tickets, numbers 1-200 to line up here"

• they have a brief "interview" with people to decide on who to call up (ie. the sailor and the woman who's 60th birthday it is)

• no camera or cell phones allowed. you have to go through a metal detector and leave your phone in a cardboard box.

• the studio is way smaller then it looks on tv

• the stage is also a lot smaller then you think

• the announcer, Rich Fields, talks before the show and is really funny. he tries to tell you what to do and where to go when if you get called up

• Drew talks to the crowd between commercials, while they are setting up the games and he was also really funny.

• there are about 15 people and 3 cameras on the stage during the show, making it difficult to see what's going on from the audience

• it is almost IMPOSSIBLE to hear anything that drew or the announcer is saying. they want you to clap and cheer constantly and their microphones don't amplify out to the crowd so it's real confusing.

• when they say "Joe Smith, come on down..." you can't hear that at all so they have 2 people up on stage that hold up big signs with "Joe Smith" written on it.

• it did seem a lot more difficult when you're there compared to sitting on the couch at home. especially for the first two games it was weird, but by the end you got the hang of it.

• many of the people in the crowd were their for their 2nd or 3rd time. one guy in the crowd was from Hawaii and it was his 16th time on the show. but most of the repeat attendees are from the LA area. they said that the record was this guy who was on 69 times before he finally got called up to contestants row.

comments | | Read More...

LV - AZ - LA - CO

Tuesday, 11 May 2010

Well i just got back from my almost 3 weeks of being on vacation. I don't really feel like typing out everything that happened so i'll just do a quick outline:

Las Vegas

• Walked up and down the strip several times and had a great time
• Went to the ACMA's, got to be seat fillers and part of Taylor Swift's song
• Went to an outdoor concert on Freemont street
• Stopped at the Grand Canyon on the drive to Arizona

Arizona

• Went to Sedona National Park
• Went hiking several days in Globe Arizona, somewhere between 4,000 and 8,000 ft

Los Angeles

• Went to an Dodgers game
• Got to be on the Price is Right show (airs May 27th)
• Went to Universal Studio

Colorado

• Went to Garden of the Gods, which is at the base of the Rocky's near Pikes Peak
• Went to the Sugarland concert

I guess some other things happened too, like being stopped by the police in Kansas. Apparently they thought we were drug traffickers, going from Arizona to Detroit. Luckily we were able to outsmarted them and get away.

That's about it.

comments | | Read More...