Moose's Trip Report....

moose · Mar 03,2010, 10:08 PM

So between trying to find Wes, and AYCE Sushi - and also having sushi for breakfast didn't really sit well with mmoose - so we have to pull off the highway to find some water for her, anyways we get to the dam really late, about 3:30 pm. The last $30 tour has already left for the day. There is a shorter power plant tour for $11 but DAMmit, I'm only going to come here once, might as well see everything there is to see. So we decide to bail and come back on Sat and eat the $7 parking fee, of which we parked for about 5 minutes. Nice. You would think that when you pull in they might fucking tell you no more tours or something.

Ever since 9/11 tour buses and transport trucks have been banned from driving over the dam for fear of a large bomb. Also it is only a 2 lane highway and with all the traffic and pedestrians touring the dam, crossing from one side to the other, it gets really backed up. So they are building a completely new bridge over the gorge. It will be finished in Nov 2010 and is the world's highest of its' type or something. Just wish I could have seen it before they completed the arch. That would have been pretty cool. They are actually using the original cableway used to construct the dam in 1930, to build the bridge. It is the oldest and largest operating cableway in the world.

Hey. It's the dam. Not too much traffic on this side but if you look carefully you will see the Az traffic backed all the way up the hill.

The bridge and the cableway. The hydro tower looks funny but it has to run down the gorge to the power station. There is a smaller cableway in the foreground. The cableway I'm talking about is right over the centre of the arch.

The previous picture didn't look too bad but in this picture you get a bit of a feel for how high this bridge is.

moose · Mar 03,2010, 11:51 PM

So of course on the Nevada side, as soon as you clear the gorge, there is the Hacienda Casino, which has $1 craps. We decide to give it a roll. It's just me and mmoose and the stickman so we fool around a bit. We both have some fairly hot rolls and shooting $1 or $2 flat bets and crappy 2x odds. Ok sorry for the puns but whatever, I make $50 and mmoose makes $44 after flipping the stickman some tips and we beat it back to Vegas. Not bad. We cover our Hoover rip off 5 min parking and our gas and pay for the trip back tmr and the parking and the tour fees. WOOT!

So I head to the Mirage for the 7pm Fri night bounty tourney. $150 I think and a pretty good structure. Unfortunately nothing goes my way and I bust early, but not before, strangely enough, the whiney guy I tilted out of the TI bounty tourney, before it even started, on my previous trip to Vegas. During the tourney I run into one of the worst dealers of my entire trip. On one hand, the board has the flush, the two allin players start grabbing back their chips and the dealer is like WTF is going on and the players have to point out that it is a chop. The dealer chops up the remaining chips and one player flips the other some chips because he chopped it wrong. BAD.

Then I wander over to Harrahs because we have coupons that get us a tshirt for 1 hours play in the poker room. I already cashed in a similar coupon at the Flamingo, so I am looking to score my 3rd free tshirt of the trip. The table is horrible, as in the worst players I have ever seen but I lose a $200+ pot to Q6s and Jcrap when two players go runner runner flush to crack my flopped set AA for the first time in the entire trip and of course there is no AA cracked promo at Harrahs at this time. I never recover but I stick around until 5 am for an insanely stupid 8 hour session and lose $166. Yes it's a $166 tshirt. Awesome times.

I find out in the morning that mmoose won $26 playing 1-2nl at Bills and also paid for a massage out of her winnings. She had pinched something in her neck, cancelling our plans to ride the Desperado coaster in Primm, which was the tallest coaster in the world in 1996, though it's not even in the top 10 anymore. So since that was out I didn't really mind coming back to Hoover dam on Sat. instead, when we found out that we had missed the last tour on Fri. Anyways it is still the 6th longest, and it gives us an excuse to come back in Oct/Nov.

Anyways getting up at 9 am on less than 4 hours sleep was pretty rough, but it was our last day and we had to check out and get to the dam as early as possible. I really don't find Vegas a restfull vacation at all. Good times but I eat too much, drink to much, gamble too much and sleep almost not at all. Oh well, sleep is what you are supposed to do on the red eye flight home, right?

So in the race to get to Hoover dam, we skip breakfast and arrive about 10:45 am. The first two tours are sold out already and we get tix for the 12:45 tour. It's not so bad though, there is a museum to wander around and a short movie to kill the time. So we pack into the new elevators to take us down to the power plant. I mean literally you are packed like sardines into this thing - 95 people, so squished there is no room to move at all. 15 people are on the full tour and the rest take the shorter power plant tour. So you go down and listen to a short presentation while standing right on one of the huge penstocks that carries water to the turbines. Pretty cool especially I think there are 17 of these massive pipes on the Nevada side and 19 on the Arizona side.

Hey it's the dam!

Hey it's the power plant, waaaay down there. For scale, you can see a couple service vehicles sitting there outside the power plant.

Inside the Nevada side power plant, one of the long rectangular buildings, from the shot above.

So from here we got to go inside the actual dam as part of the $30 tour, while the $11 cheapos headed back up. So into the original elevators, 15 people, packed just as tightly as the new elevators. The tour guide said the longest he was stuck was 18 minutes which doesn't seem too bad, except when you realize that you would be standing there with absolutely no room to move, no way sit down or to lean on anything unless your neighbour was willing to let you lean on him.

So it was cool to walk around the tunnels inside the walls of the dam. The only interior shot I kept was this one, which is a drainage/inspection staircase running along where the wall of the dam meets the rock face. The other side of the dam is actually steeper and uses a spiral staircase instead. Essentially what happens is water drains out through holes drilled into the rock face so that water does not pool between the rock face and the concrete, and drains down alongside the staircase into a sump. Have fun working there and having to climp those stairs for inspection purposes!

So from there, the tour ended and we rode the old elevators back up to the top and wandered around the top of the dam.

Hey look, it took me almost an hour to walk from Nevada to Arizona!

Yeah baby! One foot in Nevada, one foot in Arizona!

Damn an hour later. Better get my ass back to Nevada so my vacation lasts longer.

You can also see that the water level behind the dam is at it's 2nd lowest alltime point. It stores 2 years worth of water, so lots left. The main point of the dam is to store water and they only release what is required by agreement to supply the states downstream of the dam. Power generation is only a secondary bonus to releasing the water.

Ok so enough of this shit. Time to return to gambling heaven. This time we stop at Railroad Pass casino outside of Henderson on the way back to Vegas. We need food as it is almost 4 pm and we haven't eaten anyting for almost 24 hours.

boogeyman · Mar 04,2010, 12:10 AM

I am thouroughly, THOUROUGHLY enjoying this read.

Thanks.

moose · Mar 04,2010, 12:15 AM

So we swing into Railroad Pass and mmoose goes for the $.99 hotdog and I sit for the $2.99 burger combo special. Service is slow though and I get antsy because I haven't done any gambling since 5 am. So I decide I am going to put $10 into $.25 roulette and spin until I lose it or double up, because I have never really played roulette before, other than the rare degen red/black coupon or something. Of course my birthday hits 3x but I never do the obv thing and put a freakin' quarter straight up on the number, which would have paid $9 for my stupid quarter. I spin for a while but it's more boring than I could ever have imagined and I slowly start to realize that the way I am betting, the best I could hope for on each spin is to break even. So I change up my bets a bit and take riskier bets and piss away $5. I decide I can't stand this anymore and move on to $1 craps. So I hit one hot roll in craps ($1 flats and 2x odds again) and I think mmoose and I are up over $50 ea. but of course now my beer arrives. I finally figure out how the 'free' beer thing works now in casinos because I decide to play until my beer is gone. So we hit the road having downed a really expensive beer but at least the winning streak in craps remains with me up $13 and mmoose up $10.

We drive into Vegas and park at Harrahs so I can claim my $166 free tshirt POS and also waste prolly 45 min standing in line and also learn I can't convert my comps to Bill's. So we take my shitty tshirt and head to Bill's to use the $10 food comp they gave us when we checked in 6 days ago. Of course I don't want to waste gambling time, so while we wait for our table, I head for the nearest craps table, throw a $50 on the table and yell out $5 on pass, just as some lady is throwing the dice. Well my bad, I found out it's a $10 min table with 3/4/5x odds and she rolls an 8, so my $50 doesn't even cover max odds. I just want to play out the one number so I let her roll about 8x and watch 5 hit 3 or 4 times, which sucks. So decide to pony up another $50 and take the max odds on my 8. Of course, right after I do that, we get called for dinner. So I max the odds but don't take anymore bets. One more roll and she hits the point and grab my $70 profit. We go for the AYCE $9.99 chinese, where you can only order one dish, but have as much of it as you want. It comes with a decent egg drop soup and the two plates are so huge, we don't even order any refills. After the $10 comp and cashing out the comps we got from playing poker earlier in the week, dinner costs $3.13.

Whoops. Almost forgot about electronic craps. Ok so the electronic poker tables at Excalibur got pulled last year but electronic craps I had never heard of before. We passed by this on our way out of Bill's to drop off the rental car. Unfortunately we didn't have time to play as they were offering $3 min so the table was packed and I couldn't get a computer. This thing was brand freakin' new because I had played a regular table in this very spot earlier in the week when we were staying at Bill's. You buyin with cash and the stickman credits your computer and you roll actual dice, but you win credits and when you cash out they give you chips. I find it kind of interesting because while it is a bit fun to scoop up the chips when you win, it is also extremely depressing when someone sevens out and the entire table gets wiped of chips. Also I find the racks an extremely inconvienent way to store your chips because it is very difficult to count them. So I am kind of meh over losing the chips and it's much better than electronic poker because at least you throw real dice. The game plays all kind of sound effects and things to psyche up the crowd too. Still I'd have to actually play to give a real opinion. I also like that it comes with chairs. Anyone heard of electronic craps before?

We head for the rental car drop off lot, which couldn't have been easier or more efficient. Seriously I'm never going to Vegas again without renting a car. Totally worth it. We grab the shuttle to the airport and there is not ONE person in line at security. Wow, we hit the jackpot on our final Vegas gamble. Sick metagame for sure. Good times. Can't wait to go back.

All the numbers in are in my posts, but I'll get around to totalling it up shortly. Losing the $150 tourn + $166 cash on Fri hurt me but hopefully I'm about even on the trip.

JohnnieH · Mar 04,2010, 07:48 AM

Amazing TR moose!

compuease · Mar 04,2010, 08:44 AM

best ever TR.... You have set the standard... Still no hookers an blow tho.. mmoose not in agreement?

westside8 · Mar 06,2010, 12:56 AM

Nice report Moose. Sorry about Fri...I left a voicemail on your Flamingo phone but I'm guessing you never got it?