Vegas II

(April 09, 2008)

Ah, room sweet room. I just got back from the airport with Ryan and Janice, our PR people. The three of us went to pick up two more of us (Billy and Jordan). By Saturday the rest of the guys'll be here from Oz and Europe. The whole fam damily.

I feel like I'm going to be in Vegas for a month. It's two weeks, but it's going to feel like longer.

Janice took me and Ryan to the Pink Taco for dinner tonight. "PINK TACO?" I said when they picked me up outside my hotel. "Is there any way that's NOT a lesbian joint?"

It may be, but mostly it looks like any other Mexican restaurant, except it's inside the Hard Rock. Janice got the fajitas. I had the chicken enchilada. Ryan had a burrito and a crush on the waitress -- he filled out a service questionnaire with this comment: "I considered stealing the following three things:
1. The basket of tortilla chips
2. The bike
3. The waitresses heart"

Heh. Pink Taco's food was okay. Way more welcome to my tummy than what I ate yesterday. Good lord, my poor tummy. First of all, on the plane I slept through (and no doubt snored like a chainsaw through) the breakfast meal, so about an hour and a half before landing I got the US Air $7 special "turkey sandwich on a bagel." Which turned out to be a raisin bagel. Raisin? Really, Airline Food-Planning Experts? I reasoned to my flummoxed seatmate, a florid sales-y kinda yakker, that it could be worse -- could be a pizza raisin bagel. At least you could kinda make a case for turkey and raisins together. Thanksgiving. Some stuffings have raisins in, right? But he wasn't buying it. He brandished the little tub of Philly cream cheese that came with the weird sandwich. "What's THIS for then?" That I don't know. Neither of us used the cream cheese.

Weird food day got weirder at the convention center, where, despite the gargantuan hall buzzing butts-to-nuts with a jillion workers building displays, not one single concession stand or snack bar was open yet. The electrician (rock star Pete) told me that there is "a truck."

"A truck? You mean a roach coach pulls up outside in the afternoon?"

Man. Food off the back of a damn truck. A stinky, dusty truck. But I was pretty hungry, so I joined the throng. It was me and thirty-three teamsters picking out slabs of various oily meat product and sweating no-name soda cans to go with no-name ketchup on flaccid french fries beside a sad, cardboard-flavored burger.

My first meal in Las Vegas, ladies and gents. Gastronomic hell.

Well, it's getting late, I have to get up as six again so...more to come.