Nevada trip report

[gut]

So my thoughts (sorry buccos, if you would prefer this to not be in your thread then Druff can re-arrange).

I stayed at Flamingo for 3 nights, when I checked in via kiosk i wound up in a dirty room. Not like "Druff" dirty, literally an uncleaned room. Hadn't been turnover from whoever stayed there the previous night.

Well, they switched me to a better view, lol. So anyway, Flamingo was operating like a place that could not get enough employees back. Poker room closed on tues & wed, convenience store....who knows what their hours were. Kinda wild west type shit going on.

First thing: nickel-n-diming has gotten way worse. I remember being shocked when I was told only 1 free drink ticket for every $50 in the book, I guess now it is 1 for every $100. LOLZ

I'm no AP like Mickey Fuckin Crimm, but the slots were tight as fuck. Like "should just burn your money" tight.

Poker still =faggot, but being that I couldn't even play at my home casino most of the time, I went to Bally's for some 1-3 NL and tourneys. Couldnt find any limit less than the 20-40 at Bellagio on center strip. Guess limit players midweek just have to go downtown.

$17 for a blue moon sounds about right.

I feel like Vegas will soon have to face a reckoning. People can legally sports bet from their house. Maybe poker again soon. I can play slots at stupid dive bars here in Portland. Why am I going to Vegas again?

Were you there a week ago? If so, you could have see me and Brandon!

We were with friends who like doing recreational gambling at UTH, so we went to Flamingo to get a lower limit table. We also noticed the poker room being closed (this was Tuesday).

We noticed the same thing with the skeleton crew. Laughably, they weren't able to re-generate Brandon's Caesars Rewards card from the pit. He kept saying, "Just log me in, don't worry about the physical card", and it took them like 6 times to understand.

Jesus fucking Christ. I swear I was talking about this trip somewhere on here before.

Next time we will meet up then. Need to buy Brandon a drink still.

....and you a pepsi.

[Sanlmar]

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[simpdog]

Do they also tack on pump (resort) fees?

[go_buccos]

Sorry for the delay in posting the last part of the TR...

So that last part of our trip was spent in Northeast Nevada. First night after leaving Winnemucca was spent in Elko, with a brief stop in Battle Mountain to check for machines. Battle Mountain is home every November to the Battle Mountain Chukar Tournament. Chukar is a bird similar to a pheasant that apparently is very difficult to hunt, so hunters come from all over the country to take on this challenge.

Elko, which along with its "suburb" Spring Creek, is far and away the largest city in the 520-mile stretch between Salt Lake and Reno. (And that's not saying much... the two towns combined are just a hair over 32,000 people.)

Elko sits at the base of the Ruby Mountains, which are a pretty well-kept secret and are Northeast Nevada's version of the Sierra. They are stunningly beautiful. They are far enough away from the Sierra to be largely out of its rain shadow so there's a surprising amount of flora and fauna present and a ton of outdoor stuff to do. (Google "Lamoille Canyon" for an example.). In fact, when we were there the highest peaks had more snow on them then the peaks in the Sierra around Tahoe did.

There are 4 "full-service" casinos in Elko, and several smaller places. We found lots of playable machines. 2 places have table games but there's no live poker that I'm aware of, which is somewhat surprising as the main industry in Elko is gold mining so there's a definite male skew to the population and these guys are paid well.

We would see tons of Coach USA buses all over town, no matter what time of day or night. Turns out they are being used as shuttles that take the miners to the mines and back for their shifts.

The next day we headed for Wendover, which is a short drive so we detoured off of 80 onto US-93 and headed to Jackpot, which is the gambling town on Nevada's border with Idaho. One big "full-service" casino and a couple of smaller outfits. The big one is called Cactus Pete's and is owned by Penn National. It uses the "mychoice" card that all their properties nationwide use. No poker room, which again surprised me a bit. Of course 95% of the cars in the parking lot had Idaho plates, with Twin Falls (about 45 miles north) and Pocatello being the main markets.

So that beings us to Wendover, which sits at the I-80 entrance to Nevada from Utah.

Wendover has 5 casinos and literally nothing else. If you want to do ANYTHING besides gamble on a vacation, Wendover is NOT the place for you. It lacks any kind of soul or character whatsoever. 3 of the casinos are owned by Peppermill Reno, and all 3 basically look like cheap Peppermill Reno knock-offs. The other two are owned by Maverick Gaming and are pretty dumpy. Still, hordes of gamblers from Salt Lake come and fill it up on weekends. The Peppermill itself does have a fully-reopened poker room and it's on Bravo. We were there during the week so I didn't check it out but I've heard the games can be insanely good on weekends, much like Harvey's Tahoe.

The one cool thing to see nearby was the Bonneville Salt Flats, which is where a lot of the land speed records have been broken throughout history. They're only about a 10-minute drive away. The ground was nothing but salt for literally as far as the eye could see and you can actually drive your car out onto them. The surface was not as smooth as I was expecting but it was still a very cool thing to do and see.

From there we started making our way back toward Vegas on US-93. We stayed 2 nights in Ely, which is a really neat little town. All kinds of outdoor stuff to do nearby and the highlight is an old preserved railway from back in Ely's mining days. They have preserved a 1909 steam locomotive (complete with a guy shoveling coal to power it) that they still use to this day to give railway tours to the old mines and back. It was one of the highlights of our trip.

Ely has 5 casinos, but no table games or live poker. The Hotel Nevada and Gambling Hall has THE SMALLEST hotel rooms (and bathrooms) I've ever stayed in but other than that there's nothing wrong with them. We got VERY drunk at a bar called Club Rio the first night we were there and we met some interesting locals, including a guy named "Chief," who as he put it "is kinda the muscle around here." Interesting characters for sure.

Saturday it was back to Vegas on US-93 via Pioche and Caliente. VERY scenic drive with great views of Wheeler Peak but there's nothing particularly interesting to report in either town. We had a couple hours back in Vegas so we checked out Resorts World (posted separately about in that thread) and then got on our flight home.

It was an absolutely fantastic trip. We got 11 of our 14 nights comped... the three rooms we had to pay for were in Elko, Winnemucca and Tonopah. We drove a little over 2,000 miles total and I would say we spent an average of $3.50/gallon on gas. The most expensive gas we saw was (naturally) in South Lake Tahoe at $4.999/gal for regular and the cheapest was a TOTAL one-off... a Shell in Battle Mountain at $3.169/gal.

We spent in the neighborhood of $2,500 on all expenses (including souvenirs/touristy stuff, etc.) and won a little less than $2,000 gambling so our 2-week vacation cost us a total of $560 all in, and we did NOT slum it. We very easily got another $3,000 [in retail value] worth of stuff comped between all the rooms, and a lot of meals and drinks.

Were rental cars not so outrageous these days we would have broken even. So it goes...

I think I'll condense all these reports into one and post it separately. Hope y'all enjoyed them!

[sonatine]

its sad that peppermill has done so much remodeling.

its strongest appeal for like 20 years was that it was like walking around in a paul thomas anderson movie.

[go_buccos]

@go_buccos

any rental car advice or war stories?


this has been an issue for us on trips in the east. Relatively easy trips are turning into exercises in anger management over availability and price gouging.

Just picking up your car at an airport can be an hour or more. Never ending surprises await you at the counter. Ft Meyers had a line out the door and crowd control.

I understand fleets got sold and there just aren’t any but it sucks.

So for some reason I'm just seeing this. Sorry, Sanlmar!

Not really much sage advice to give at the moment... you're just going to pay out the ass, plain and simple. I expect it to be a year or more before supply once again equals demand.

One thing I can tell you: avoid wisecars.com at all costs.

I actually talked about this on radio last night. Wisecars is sort of like autoslash. They're basically an aggregator which will plug in various coupon codes at sites based on whether you're active duty military or have Costco/AAA memberships, etc. etc. We found what we thought was a great deal through them. (relatively speaking given the times, anyway.) It was weird though... you pay up front, but then instead of of getting a direct confirmation of a booking, you're sent some kind of voucher that you take to the counter when you show up to rent the car.

Well, after some digging into yelp reviews, etc., it seemed there were many instances where these vouchers were not being accepted at the counter and all kinds of fail ensued. So my girlfriend requested a refund. A few days went by and she finally got an email saying (paraphrasing) COVID-19 has been hard on all of us. Due to the ongoing pandemic, refunds may be processed slower than usual. You can expect to receive your refund SOMETIME IN THE THIRD QUARTER OF 2021.....

Yeah, no.

She wound up disputing it with the CC company and of course they refunded her rather promptly.

We've had good experiences with Autoslash and I do recommend them.

[Daly]

How does one “slot hustle”

[Sanlmar]

@buccos

We used Wisecars this past year. It was during covid and was uneventful. They are relentless with the spam emails now

I will avoid them going forward and look forward to that piece on the radio


Hmmm ... now that I think about it maybe they were one of my rental problem experiences.