We made it home safely last night, and actually had quite a smooth trip both ways.

I wish I could say I had a better time on this trip, but I just spent WAY too much of it working for it to really pass a vacation. We had some nice moments, but always with work hanging over my head.

We stayed at the Flamingo, which I will not do again and wouldn't recommend to anyone. While the location is great, the place is just not nice. We've decided the decor could be best described as klassy--lots of hot pink and gold. We were in one of the "Go Rooms" that looked like what would happen if Austin Powers and IKEA had a love child.

The hotel is old, complete with that old-casino stench, and the service is very hit or miss. Housekeeping as a real mess. Our room didn't get done up one day until almost 7:00pm! And half the time something (shampoo, hand towels, etc.) would be missing. After a few days of this I called to complain, and the guy just said they had 4,000 rooms and they were backed up. Well, unless some hotel fairy magically dropped new rooms on the hotel overnight, they've always had that many rooms and need to staff for them!

The problems continued and finally on our second to last night, I had enough. They had forgotten to give us any TP, and 4 hours after I called for some we STILL hadn't gotten it, so I went down to the front desk. The lady who helped me was nice, and they gave us about $60 in food and beverage comps, but even with her calling housekeeping on our behalf it took them almost an hour to finally deliver our supplies. Ugh!

Hotel problems and work nonwithstanding, we did manage to have some fun. We channeled our inner 90 year olds and played 3 sessions of bingo, and held our own $5 penny slot tournament (DH won, with $2.50 remaining after 15 minutes). Not to be outdone, I challenged him to a $5 nickel video poker duel and won. Lots of silly fun.

We also had an adventure heading out to a restaurant called Four Kegs that we'd seen featured on the Food Network show Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. The show featured their stromboli, which DH loves, so we had to make a trip. It was, as advertised, quite a dive, but the food was AMAZING! What made it really special for us was they had Sicillian pizza that tasted just like how DH's mom used to make it. When she passed away her recipe passed with her, and I was sad that he'd never get to have it again, so I was overjoyed to find this. It was a really nice moment for him to get to remember his mom's cooking like that.

So now it's back to the grind. I've got another "working trip"--this time to San Francisco--coming up next month. Hopefuly it will be more of a vacation next time!