The Lucky Donut

 Click on the graph to enlarge.

 Tournament begins at 12 noon (8pm UK time)

I already wrote about how badly Terrible’s breakfast buffet sucked, but with a ton of points to spend we’ve already been back twice for free lunches.

Here’s the deal with Terrible’s, and the reason we can’t stay away.  Every day apart from Thursday and Sunday (which are double point days) you can get a $5 gift card to spend at their gas stations (in fact it looks like they will work at any Chevron pump) with every 1000 points earned – PLUS you get to keep the points.

One point is awarded for every $1 pumped through a machine.  They have 9/6 jacks-or-better video poker, which is a 99.5% payback and so with every $1000 played, your expected loss is $5 and the gas card freebie makes it a break-even game.  We’ll use a lot of gas this trip so it’s just as good as money.

The Jeep may have to be swapped before we go anywhere outside the valley, as there’s a very peculiar leak that seems to be coming from the air conditioner.  It gets wet under the passenger side mat as well as dripping onto the ground after stopping – quite a worry for a vehicle that’s only 500 miles old.

After the free gas, you still get to spend your points.  That same 1000 points is worth just over $3 at the cafe or $5 in the gift shop.  I already blew some on a shirt, a bottle of Jim Beam and some tickets to see George Wallace.  The buffet though is the best value by miles.  Breakfast is just 250 points, lunch 350 and dinner 500.  We could already eat there for the next three weeks for free – if we wanted to.

A $14 bottle of my mate Jim – yes, that’s about 7 quid – was 2800 points.  A bargain if we paid for it and even better for free, but the same points would be worth five dinner buffets – if we could ever possibly eat that many!  George Wallace was 2000 points for 2 tickets, worth (apparently) $87 each.  I don’t expect anyone ever pays full price, but it’s still a pretty sweet deal.

Lunch really isn’t too bad, if you don’t expect the same spread you’d get for $19.95 at the Bellagio.  It’s pretty much canteen food, functional and nothing special.  There’s a taco station, some kind of pasta or spaghetti, some kind of stewed meat and a salad bar.  If there were pizza slices it would be perfect, but it’s still absolutely fine to keep you going through to dinner!  Remember, we’re here for four weeks – it doesn’t have to be prime rib and shrimp every day!

So am I winning so far?  Nope.  But Claire is more than making up for it.  "Can I have a jack of hearts please", she turned to me and asked.  "OK", I said, pretending to do a jedi mind trick to the machine.

And there it was.

Shouldn’t we have left the rain behind?  It’s cleared up a bit now, but it was a very wet morning – for the desert, at least.  It’s probably gorgeous back in England, but if it is, please don’t hurry to tell me.

It gets real slippy here when it rains.  When the temperature has been in three figures for the past couple of months, there’s a fair amount of rubber residue on pretty much every road.  As well as having the "mid-size" 3.7L Jeep we rented slide around a bit – in addition to the "increased risk of tipping" that it helpfully advises on the sun visor – we already saw a nasty accident on Flamingo first thing this morning, which was backing up traffic past the Palms.  Well, that was first thing for anyone who isn’t jet-lagged.  By then we’d already earned enough comp points at Terrible’s for four free breakfast buffets, and redeemed two of them.

It only took about 40 minutes of video poker to earn these (and two more in the bank) so how bad does a free buffet have to be before you ask for your money back?  This one certainly came close, and that’s saying something because I’m really not fussy about quality.  If it’s edible and there’s plenty of it, I’m usually satisfied – especially when I’m not paying for it. 

While I still managed to fuel up on enough pastries to make it worth the $4.99 advertised value (which nobody will actually pay) what I want to know is how come all the hot food was cold already, when we were there when it opened at 7am on the dot?

OK, it’s not the Wynn, but it’s also not $17.95 each.  I can’t expect many different types of egg (in fact, I heard that at the Wynn there are two different types of Eggs Benedict alone; Terribles choice was scrambled, or nothing) but I don’t think it’s too much to expect the eggs – or the bacon, sausage, potato or pancakes – to be warm.

It got lighter this morning earlier than I expected and by 6am it was no longer dark enough to take the night shots of Vegas that I wanted, so I only got one session from the top of the MGM parking structure.  It’s a pretty good view of the MGM itself and Hooters, with Mandalay Bay and Luxor visible from a distance.

Although I’m still getting used to my new camera, this photo has made me feel a bit better about splurging nearly £300 for a super wide angle lens.

Landed.  Unpacked.  Slept.  Woke up early, as usual.  OK, so there’s a bit more to it than that, but nothing really interesting enough to report.  Except that I was very pleased to see that the New Frontier neon sign is still flashing away. 

3.10am and wide awake.  Nevermind, it’s a perfect time to try to get some good night photos I guess.

Meantime, this is the only thing I’ve snapped so far.  The entrance to the loos at the car rental place.  It’s Elvis for the gents, and a showgirl for the ladies – I just didn’t have the bottle to take a picture of the ladies.

The new airport consolidated car rental facility is a great idea, but still has horribly long lines.  Although they weren’t as long as the line for immigration was yesterday.  We landed just after the MyTravel flight from Manchester got in, and at the same time as another plane full of Germans.  Stuck at the back of the plane, we were some of the last to get through.

BMI called me a few weeks ago to say that the flight times had been changed, from a 10am departure to 9.50am.  Hardly worth the call, but I thought maybe that extra ten minutes would make sure we were at the head of the queue.  No such luck.  However the change to the flight did mean that the seat reservations we made more than 9 months ago had been cleared.  No mention of that at all.

EDIT: Claire took this for me the next time 🙂