The Chambers

A bit of a wrap up of Vegas first….

We did a walk up and down the strip on the Wednesday. There are a lot of interesting things to take in on a walk up and down the strip and we went into quite a lot of casino’s and walked through them to have a look at the slot machines and gaming tables and we went into their stores (some have malls!) and the special attractions they have. Yes – we took Jackson through the casino’s, but I only let him play the one cent machines – I JOKE!! But we did walk him through the casinos, we had to so that we could get to the shops and attractions. Jackson, for some reason, thinks the poker machines are coke machines. I can’t remember why – so as we’d walk through and past the machines, Jackson would ask me if I was going to get a can of coke? Some of the special attractions we saw were real live Lions at the MGM, M&M World and real live M&M characters for Jackson to get his photo with, we went to see the dolphins at one, but the line was long and the admission charge high, we saw large aquariums, we saw dozens of people on street corners handing out “business cards” for *ahem* ladies of the “night”, or day apparently, coke (as in the beverage) world, we also saw the eiffel tower, lots on construction being done on new casino’s, robotic statues fighting over atlantis, a pirate ship being renovated, rode a tram, a monorail and a gondola down a venetian canal and saw bits of Paris, New York, Monte Carlo, Italy and ancient Rome. It was a long day and our feet were tired from the walk – we’d set off at 730am or so and got back to the hotel about 11 or 12 hours later…. room service dinner at our table with a view of the strip and an early night…. a very interesting day

Our stay in Las Vegas ended on Thursday, as we checked out to head to San Francisco. We did a bunch of amazing stuff in Las Vegas and I didn’t really get warmed up on the gambling front. During our walk around on the day before, I had spent some time in a few of the casino’s on reconnaissance missions to find just the right poker machine for a last minute raid on the floors before we checked out of Vegas. So, while Kylie and Jackson were sleeping I headed off to my meeting with the multi-hand blackjack machine – what a lovely little poker machine it was. I played it for about an hour or so with reasonable success, except for the one game when I pressed bet maximum instead of deal and bet $70 on one hand and lost it all… grrrrr. Kylie wants to get the casino video of the second I realised I’d pressed the wrong button, I just want to forget it and move on. dumb machines. I also found a star wars poker machine, which game me back some of my losses from my wrong button pressing mistake.

Back to the hotel and we checked out and headed to the airport. The guy who picked us up from the hotel for our transfer told us that we probably wouldnt get around the excess luggage charges on our bags unless we looked after the guy at curbside check-in. That sounded like a challenge to me. So, when we got to the airport and all our luggage was on the curbside, I got in line to see what we could do about this excess luggage problem and considering I hadnt made our fortunes on the casino floor we needed to minimise the excess luggage charges. The charges by the way are $100 for each bag of the size and weight we are travelling with, so we’d have been looking at $300 in excess luggage charges. Anyways… after some discussions about how nice a place Australia is, and the guy seeing my poor helpless son and the bag he’d have to carry to the check in counter if we couldnt do curbside and me letting him now we’d look after him, we were able to check in curbside and avoid the excess luggage costs! yippee! it did cost us $2 per bag and a $60 tip – but it still saved us a couple of hundred dollars, which I was happy about.

We passed through the security checks in a breeze and our flight was uneventful and we were in San Francisco by mid afternoon.

This was Thanksgiving Day and I had arranged for us to go to a nice restaurant for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. Jackson was very well behaved and we were able to enjoy a lovely traditional US Thanksgiving dinner of Turkey and deserts were ice cream for Jackson, Pumpkin Pie for Kylie and I had warm bread and butter pudding – all of this washed down with a lovely pinot from carlton, oregon!

The hotel we are staying at in San Fran is perched on top of the main hill – Nob Hill – and has excellent views towards the bay and of San Francisco. We can see a slither of Alcatraz from our room. The hotel is well positioned, but next time I think we’ll stay down in Union Square – it’s where most of the action is, shops, cable cars start there and restaurants too.

The hill we had to walk up after dinner would have burned off some of the bread and butter pudding….