Vegas Trip Report

This past weekend I made the drive to Vegas to meet up with my buddies from Cleveland Dave, Brad, Tony and Jake.

Since I plan on buying a new car, I decided to set a $50 limit on gambling.

I planned to leave for Vegas at 8pm right after getting my car appraisaled from Carmax. Well the appraisal process ended earlier than I expected but I was not happy with the result. Carmax gave me a low ball $9000 offer for my car which is absolutely ridiculous! So, I was in a pissed off mood when I left for Vegas at 7:30pm. Besides a bit of traffic leaving LA, it was a pretty uneventful 4.5hour drive.

I listened to the UPGRD Podcasts during the drive and basically forgot about the Carmax offer.
I gotta admit, the second the Vegas skyline appears on the otherwise boring drive on I-15 gotta rank up there in terms of exciting moments.

Overall the weekend was filled with lots of drinking, laughing, eating and observing my buddies gamble. The company was great and filled with interesting characters. We had a guy who was 6'8, a uber nerd who works for Google, and a guy who was a contestant on Jeopardy. The pit bosses and dealers kept making bets on how tall my 6'8 buddy was when we walked up to a table.

I was able to stay within my gambling budget and left Vegas happy. And of course, no Vegas trip ends this uneventfully...

I left Vegas after lunch at 3pm, and naturally hit a pocket of traffic. That pocket lasted till the Nevada border. More traffic ensued randomly along the drive. We had to stop at the Agricultural stop and the mother of all traffic, a truck flipped over and caught on fire closing 2 lanes along the mountain roads entering LA. So in total, I was behind the wheel for 8 frickin hours, reaching home at 10:45pm. I could have made it 4/5 of the way to Asia! Completely ridiculous!

Vegas

So I will be setting off to Las Vegas tonight to visit my college buddies Dave, Brad, Jake and his buddies. Since I am about 500 miles away from my next oil change(I want to spend as little money as possible since I am selling the car), I decided to rent a car to make the drive to Vegas. I am not flying this time around because the airline industry is smoking the good stuff thinking that they can get away with charging $220 for a round trip to Vegas. So I visited my handy dandy local Hertz outlet at the Tustin Auto Center and got the Hyundai Elantra for $20 a day. Since I will be crashing with my buddies(all 7 of them) in their hotel room, I might roll out of Vegas well under my $300 budget. Basically ~$150 for the car rental+gas and ~$150 for alcohol and gambling. Will give updates once I'm in Vegas.