First 2 Trip Reports, Crazy Late but Better than Never

[Hurricane]

So I've been to Las Vegas 12 times to date with my next trip planned for July 24-28, and I've never posted a trip report (shame on me), but I have some down time and I'm currently pumping myself and my friends up for this next trip, so I figure I might as well go for it. I've taken 2 trips in the past 6 months that I will try to cover, but LV memories are hazy enough the day after a trip, let alone months later, so I'll just do the best that I can and I hope you forgive any holes in the stories. I promise, this is the gist of what happened...

TRIP 1 - Halloween 2014 - Saturday November 1 through Monday November 3

The players:

Me - 30 years old M, live in Boston
RE - Also 30M, friend since college, also lives in Boston
WG - 29M, friend since high school, lives in PA
AR - 29M, friend since high school, lives in LA
ES - 26F, AR's girlfriend, lives in LA
K1 - 25F, friend of WG, met for first time at Ghostbar Day Club (GBDC)
K2 - 25F, friend of K1, met for first time at GBDC
K3 - 25F, friend of K1, met for first time at GBDC
AV - 29M, friend of WG, met for first time at GBDC

Before Las Vegas:

WG, AR and ES all met me in San Francisco on Thursday night/Friday morning, and we attend the Giants world series parade on Friday, followed by an awesome halloween party with some friends who live in SF on Friday night. Almost too awesome. Basically we drink from noon until 3am, and then I sleep for about 3.5 hours before getting up for our flight to Vegas. Just a laid back way to start the trip.


Saturday:

The plan for Saturday is bottle service at GBDC for their Day of the Killer Costumes party. We are all super amped. Since we are scheduled to land at LAS at about 12:15pm, we plan for our rooms to not be ready, so we put on our costumes at 8am in San Francisco. WG and me are minions with short jean overalls. AR is a Lt. Dangle from Reno 911, and ES is a lion tamer. We look absolutely ridiculous helping ourselves to the free continental breakfast at our upscale hotel in SF. We do not care. It should be noted that we are all still drunk from the day/night before, to varying degrees.

We Uber to SFO, where we are the only 4 people wearing costumes. A lot of people ask us what's up, to which we respond "Vegas," which explains absolutely everything and leads to a lot of smiles and a couple of high fives.

By the time we get to SFO, I am terrified of sobering up. So, once we get through security, I head straight to the bar. After an Irish Coffee and screwdriver, my fear has abated. I now know there is no chance of me sobering up today, and possibly ever again. WG takes a different tack, eating and drinking nothing and simply hoping for the best. I question his decision-making, not for the first time, nor the last. We take pictures with strangers wearing our minion costumes.

Flight is smooth into LAS, no one has any checked bags, and so we cab straight to the Cosmopolitan to check in. We meet ES in the lobby; he arrived from Boston a little bit before us. I'm staying on a comp which only includes a City Room (no balcony). I ask for a room upgrade and get offered one for something like $40/night, which I take. We end up with a room on the 58th floor, two queen beds, a giant soaking tub and walk in shower, huge balcony, and views of the Bellagio fountains. Even better, it's ready right away, so we get to drop our bags and slam back a couple of drinks before heading to GBDC.

To be continued...

[Hurricane]

We cab over to the Palms and find the entrance to the elevator for GBDC. The rest of the group is waiting there for us because the table is in my name. RE completes the minion trio as one of the evil minions. AV is dressed as Ace Ventura from the part of the movie where he is wearing a tutu over his other clothes. If you're too young to have any idea what that is, go look it up and/or just be glad that you have so much more left in the tank for Vegas trips than I do. K1-K3, and a couple of their other friends are dressed as characters from Alice in Wonderland. Almost everyone is beyond excited that we have managed to assemble this group in Vegas and are about to rage. One dude (who only K2 and K3 know) does not seem excited. He tells us that he forgot his ID and will come back after he gets it. We never see him again. Good riddance.

We elevate to the 65th floor (or whatever the actual floor is) and get led to our tables. For a $925 minimum, we are allowed up to 12 entries, and we have 3 couches and two tables (inside). It's an outrageously comfortable set-up; we never even use the third couch or the second table. I imagine that in XS this amount of space would cost $20,000. Of course, we are not in XS -- Ghost Bar has seen better days and the DJ is no one of note. The views remain cool, and because the only other game in town on this day is Lavo Brunch, it's pretty full (I'm sure not as packed as Lavo, though). This is where I have to give a shout out to the staff. Everyone we interacted with was awesome. Our servers, the busboy, security and everyone else; they were as good if not better than staff at any Tier 1 club I've been to.

We get a bottle menu and I quickly order up 3 bottles of Ciroc for $700. Crazy deal for Vegas. Our server, dressed as Luigi and being pushed in a shopping cart by a dude dressed as a Power Ranger, drop off our bottles while a couple of other servers dance and wave light sticks. 10 minutes in, and it is about to get weird.

You can guess how the next few hours go. Lots of vodka, lots of dancing, and lots of new friends. I have never been to GBDC before and I didn't expect too much, but I'm having a great time. The music is good, not great, but everyone is just killing it anyway. The costumes are amazing. Everywhere you turn, there is someone in a costume that is 8-10 feet tall and/or looks like it was pulled straight off of a movie set. There is one guy dressed as a transformer, that actually transforms into a motorcycle -- girls are riding him around the club as a motorcycle (and falling off). It's not the most sophisticated party (they sell 40s in brown bags), but it sure is a lot of fun.

Later on we hit the dance floor and it turns out Flo Rida is there. He's not performing, just making an appearance, which is meh, but after a few minutes K2 and K3 are dancing with him. There might have been some making out. I'm not sure what Flo Rida's relationship status is and we were all pretty faded at this point, so I'll say I'm not sure about that one.

We order a couple of half-bottles for shots to round out our tab and now we are all feeling really good. I buy some cigars from a dude in the bathroom, and smoke them with the other minions outside. Around this time, ES passes out in a bathroom stall. After a while we want to leave but can't find ES. After who knows how long, one of the other girls forces the stall open and finds her out like a light. ES manages to get to her feet and we head out. As we're collecting everyone downstairs to get cabs, Flo Rida walks past our group. For reasons that no one will ever understand, RE yells "Hey Florida, do you know Mitt Romney?" practically in his face. At this point it is clearly time to get folks back to the room for a nap so that we can get coherent before dinner and XS. I don't want anyone asking Kaskade about former presidential candidates later on.

To be continued...

[KinStock77]

Haha this is a great read lol keep it up

[kman90]

WG and me are minions with short jean overalls. AR is a Lt. Dangle from Reno 911, and ES is a lion tamer. We look absolutely ridiculous....a couple of their other friends are dressed as characters from Alice in Wonderland. Almost everyone is beyond excited that we have managed to assemble this group in Vegas a...

I'm not sure what Flo Rida's relationship status is

There is no way you can tease us with this image w/o pictures! C'mon pics please!

Its Vegas - does anyone really care what someone's status is?

keep it coming...

[Cirilo Medina]

I'm just wondering what Flo-Rida's response was/would've been!

[*ho_train*]

So far so good!

I second Cirilo's question! Lmao!

[Hurricane]

Flo Rida's response was to not break stride or acknowledge us, other than to politely decline to attend the after party to which we invited him. Good thing, too, because then we would have had to figure out an after party.

And I can't share the photos here, because that's just not right. I have to respect the Vegas Code. Though a bunch are probably still buried somewhere deep in the SpyOnVegas archives

Alright, picking up where we left off...

Saturday Night:

I actually have a comp at Bally's in addition to Cosmopolitan (along with a free play voucher), so I head over there with RE to check in and pick up my voucher, while WG, AR, ES, some of the girls and a couple of new friends make their way back to our room at the Cosmo. Check in at Bally's, do not bother going to the room since my stuff is already in the Cosmo, and quickly lose my free play. Very quickly, actually. $250 voucher, gone in 2 hands of blackjack at $125/each. Oh well, back to Cosmo!

Make it back to the room and it's quite a scene. Two of the girls are passed out cold spooning each other, still in their costumes -- which are short dresses hiked up above their waists. Music is playing, and everyone is either drinking and socializing or dead-eyed and comatose. Several of us have a dinner reservation at 8 or 8:30 at Gordon Ramsay Steak in Paris, but we now have a much larger group (closer to 10 than the 5 we had originally planned for), so we decide to cancel that and figure something else out. At this point, it's probably 7:30 and I decide that there's no way I can nap without sleeping through dinner and maybe even the club. So I help myself to a coconut water from the minibar, shower, and suit up.

Most of the girls and some of their friends are staying at Bally's, and so they need to head back there to change into non-costumes and get ready for the night. RE, WG and I say that we'll walk over with them. We get to the casino floor in Cosmopolitan and K3 tells me she forgot her phone in our room. Ok, no problem, RE and I will run up and get it and then meet them at Bally's. WG says he'll stick with the girls. Fair enough.

Get the phone, head over to Bally's. On the way, start getting texts from the girls asking if we've seen WG. No, we haven't, because he was with you 10 minutes ago when we left you. Well, they "lost" him. Remember that WG is a 29 year old grown man. We try calling him and then send him a bunch of informative texts with our plans, our room number, etc. and then move on. Vegas has him now.

An hour and a half of herding cats later, the entire group (other than WG) is now dressed for the night and desperately in need of food. We walk over to Mon Ami Gabi in Paris and amazingly they can accommodate our group of 10 on the patio (which overlooks the Bellagio fountains) in 10-15 minutes. Awesome. As we are waiting, two friends of friends from the group say they are going for frozen yogurt and disappear. Da f***? Luckily it's so chaotic near the entrance that the hostess does not realize our entire group is not there, which she had previously said was absolutely necessary for us to get a table on the patio.

Dinner is awesome, for us if not for the restaurant. Mon Ami Gabi has good but not great food, but you really can't beat the views of the Strip (which is like 6 feet away) and the fountains. It's also the most perfectly comfortable night to sit outside, so this works out perfectly. We really class it up and repeatedly shout "Garcon, more wine!" and "Garcon, more cheese!" en route to a very long and very drunk dinner. Two dudes that someone in our group know walk by us on the sidewalk, and before you know it they are trying to climb over the barrier into the restaurant. That gets shut down, but eventually they make their way in and join us. They are drinking PBR tallboys that they brought in from the street. That also gets shut down, so they leave. Around this time I start getting texts from WG. He is alive, but incoherent. He sends at least 3 texts that say "Holsteens" or some other misspelled variation. Apparently he is at Holstein's in the Cosmo shoveling burgers in his face. I tell him where we are and that he should meet up so we can go to a club. His response makes even less sense, and ends with "What's our Holgreen number?" Somehow I figure out that he wants our room #, so I tell him. That's that last we hear from him until 4:30 or so when he texts "Sup" while I'm walking back to the room. He's out for the night.

I don't remember what we had originally planned for Saturday night, but the girls had met some guys at GBDC who allegedly have a cabana at XS for Kaskade and have invited "all of us" to come by. Well, I'm not really big on crashing some other dudes' set up, but I love XS so I figure it can't hurt to swing by but not over-stay our welcome. When we get to XS of course there are lines everywhere. I get appointed as lead negotiator to get us all in, despite the fact that I've never even spoken to the guys inside. Oh well, I am wearing my best party suit so I'm willing to give it a shot. As we hit the line we see two more girls we know. We grab them and now we have a pretty favorable ratio, something like 6F/3M. I tell everyone to duck the rope into the VIP line and we head to the front. At the door I give the name and cabana number of the guys who invited us. I am told we can come right in but cover will be $75/$40. I say I don't think we should be paying a cover since our good friends have a cabana that we are helping pay for, and I get referred to someone else at the door. A few minutes later we are all in for free! Maybe 5 minutes of waiting and no cover at XS on a Saturday night? Excellent.

We swing by the cabana and the guys are all super nice and offer us some drinks. Like I said, I didn't come to scrounge some drinks from these guys, so we decline. We hang for a few minutes and then say we're going to go check out downstairs (the cabana was upstairs, pretty far from the DJ). RE, AR and me hit the gaming pavilion and throw some craps. It's still early so we figure we might as well get some "free" drinks while we're gambling. We don't make our fortune, but it's a pretty fun table.

Quickly the energy in the club starts to pick up, so we gamble and tip away our few remaining chips, grab some of the girls and head closer to the action. The main room is packed. Kaskade comes on and is predictably awesome. Everyone is just going crazy. This is why we Vegas.

At this point I've been drinking for over 36 hours with maybe a 6 hour break. At GBDC, I danced to exhaustion. Wilding big time. The girls have been on a pretty similar schedule, but in heels. The next day when I check my Apple Health app, it says I walked 14.5 miles on Saturday. I might have walked 2 miles -- the rest was dancing. So when someone suggests putting our legs in the hottub, that sounds like the best idea anyone has ever had. And it is. My suit pants get pretty soaked, but that's why dry cleaners exist. We meet some chill folks in the hottub and trade our stories and plans for the rest of our trips.

After that, who knows. Drinks were involved, and I know we stayed at XS until at least 3:30, I think I gambled some more in the Wynn, and then we all crashed. I think I went down around 5.

Sunday:

Sunday was mostly a washout. We had big plans but our old decrepit bodies didn't allow us to achieve them. After drinking all day and night on Friday, and then dayclub/nightclub on Saturday, we weren't up for Marquee Dome on Sunday. We went to Twin Peaks to get beers and watch the early NFL games at 10. WG again chose not to eat anything, and sat with his forehead against the table, moaning softly. He literally ate and drank nothing until 7pm on Sunday. Around noon, we headed to BLVD pool at Cosmo. Some light to moderate drinking and hottubbing, billiards, and football. Then we played some craps and blackjack. Definitely not a bad Sunday at all, but not what we had hoped for.

Sunday night we planned to get a table at Drais. Well, that's when my body really betrayed me. We had dinner at Jaleo in Cosmo, and as we were finishing up, I hit the wall, hard. I literally could not keep my eyes open. I knew that I would be passed out within 30 minutes, regardless of where I was, so I gave the rest of the group the host contact information for Drais and quickly headed for the room. At this point, I still hoped to nap and recover. But without me, group motivation fell off a cliff and when I woke up from my nap around 11, everyone else was in the room, either asleep or getting ready to sleep. Well, that sealed it. Without anyone to pull me out of bed and force me to rally, I went back to having some of the worst sleep of my life, freezing cold and sweating, having night terrors about falling off the Cosmo balcony, etc. Detox is the worst.

Monday was GODD (Get Out of Dodge Day). Some blackjack in the Cosmo before hitting the airport and flying back to Boston. I don't remember a whole lot, other than it was predictably miserable.

All in all, an excellent trip. Is it reasonable for me to be upset that at 30 (now 31, ugh) I can't party non-stop for 72 hours? Probably not. Was I upset anyway? Yes. But the partying we did do was top notch, and even the more laid back parts of the trip were filled with lots of laughs, so I have no complaints. And there's always next time.

[maxutilsperusd]

This is the first trip report in a while that sounds pretty much exactly how my trips go. Herding cats, losing someone, some great times when the plan works out, an impromptu change that is maybe even better than the original plan, the inevitable part of the plan that clearly isn't going to happen, and learning that what you were able to do a few years ago isn't necessarily the case anymore. It's really got it all. Well written and sounds like a great time.

[Hurricane]

Thanks, max. All of my trips start with a ridiculously precise plan (because I take my Vegas trips very seriously), but I also fully expect that the plan will come apart at some point and the rest will be improvisation. As long as you are always having the best time that your wallet and your body allow, I think you're doing exactly what you should be!

[wat]

Good work, man - you kept it together as long as you could. GBDC sounds like a good time

[Maximus]

Thanks, max. All of my trips start with a ridiculously precise plan (because I take my Vegas trips very seriously), but I also fully expect that the plan will come apart at some point and the rest will be improvisation.

Me too. I also plan to ridiculous levels, and feel like the sheep-herder too often, but Im resigned to the fact that all my trips will have moments that come undone, and then just have to hope you make the best of them.
Also, if you think partying like that is hard at 30, wait til 40.
At this point, I stay longer and don't do the daytimes as hard as most of you do.

Great trip report, thanks for sharing.

[ocam]

And I can't share the photos here, because that's just not right. I have to respect the Vegas Code. Though a bunch are probably still buried somewhere deep in the SpyOnVegas archives

Yes, yes they are

[ecook0808]

I don't want to be 30. Sheesh.

[wat]

I don't want to be 30. Sheesh.

It happens, bro.



Well, for some it doesn't. But 30 doesn't have to mean your party/Vegas days are done.

[CisternaChyli]

It happens, bro.



Well, for some it doesn't. But 30 doesn't have to mean your party/Vegas days are done.

I'm turning 30 in August and planning to do it big in Vegas. Ironically, I've never been in better shape than at any other point in my life. I remember going out with some peeps in Atlanta and they were pretty young. I was the oldest and still pretty ready to go at the end of the night, while they were all passed out. If you stay in shape, work out and eat right, your body can cope with a lot.