Previously, on Up Your Ass, Mickey Mouse:
Universal Studios was barely okay, L.A. traffic made me want to off myself, and some dickweed trucker rolled over on the I-15 freeway, killing himself and my family's chance to pet Shamu the Whale in San Diego. My daughter dropped a giant deuce in her swimsuit at the beach, we decided to drive screaming out of California a day early, and we had to cross the desert into Nevada at 113 degrees.
Okay, we're caught up. Hang on to your ass, kids- we're almost home.
Thursday, July 24th Primm, Nevada
We arrived at Buffalo Bill's Hotel and Casino around 7:00 Thursday night, after being caught in one traffic jam or another all day long in different parts of California. We were all tired, hungry, and ready to be out of the van for awhile.
They gave us a room on the top floor (15th) that had a strange odor; sort of a combination of failure, old people and ass. It wasn't a very nice place, but at that point I didn't give a shit. We needed a place to stay at the last minute, after our San Diego trip went down the crapper earlier. I figured this would do for one night.
We went downstairs, where they had a buffet restaurant, and chowed down on soggy shrimp and something that might have been roast beef. Or it might have been something they scraped off the highway. Not a real gourmet meal, the Buffalo Bill's Buffet.
So after that, we had to go swimming. We had gone swimming every night for six straight days, because The Girl wouldn't stop asking me about it until we went. It was around 8:30 when we went to the giant pool that was shaped like, you guessed it, a big buffalo. Buffalo? Bill's? Get it? We all just laughed and laughed...
We noticed that the lights weren't on when we got out there, and then I saw a sign that said that the pool closed at 8:00. Who the crap closes a hotel pool at 8? At that point in time, I was not ready to tell The Girl that she couldn't swim, when that was all she talked about for the last four hours of our ride during the afternoon. No friggin' way.
Screw it. Let's jump in until they kick us out. We actually got about a half hour in before some little old bastard that looked like he fell off a charm bracelet made us leave. So we barricaded the kids in the room, went downstairs and lost some money playing Pai Gow Poker, while drinking nasty Long Island Iced Teas. Everything about the hotel was kind of like Madonna- old and skanky.
We would discover just how skanky the next morning. Remember, this hotel was my idea.
Friday, July 25th- Las Vegas, Nevada
I opened my eyes Friday morning, only to discover that my lovely wife Annie was standing above me, staring a hole right through me. She was doing the old Vulcan Mind Meld, trying to wake my ass up.
"Allen, come into the bathroom. I need to talk to you."
Oh, shit.
"Allen! Now!"
So I rubbed my eyes, struggled out of bed, and went in to see what could possibly be so urgent. I thought maybe she caught one of the older boys whackin' the weasel in the shower. It wouldn't have surprised me- shit, I set a world record when I was their age. It was brilliant.
Well, imagine my surprise when I opened the door, and there she was, standing on the toilet. Swear to God.
"What the hell are you doing?"
"We have cockroaches!"
In the immortal words of Scooby Doo, ruh-roh...
We all have our things that make us jump on toilets. For me, it's mice. I hate those fast moving, come out of nowhere sons of bitches. Yeah, I know. I'm a pussy. Kiss my ass.
For my little wifey, it's big bugs and spiders.
"Where are they?", I said, hoping that she wouldn't remember that I picked the hotel.
"In the closet, under our suitcase."
So I looked under there, and sure as shit, there was a whole herd of those little bastards. How the hell did they make it up to the 15th floor? After I lifted the suitcase, they scattered like, well, cockroaches. I managed to stomp the piss out of a few to make Annie think I was semi-useful.
Still standing on the toilet, Annie announced, "We're leaving right now. Everybody pack up".
"Honey, I'd like to shower before..."
"Now!"
So we quickly threw everything in the suitcases, and off we went. Hell, NASCAR pit crews would have been proud of how fast we packed and hit the bricks. Because it was really the only place to have breakfast, we stopped at the McDonald's in the hotel's food court to eat before we took off. You can bet your sweet ass that I took a good look inside my Egg McMuffin before I took a bite of that sumbitch.
Believe it or not, Annie didn't really feel like eating, so she took the bags outside to load them up in the car. When we came out to join her, she was just standing there with kind of a blank look on her face. I could tell she had been crying.
I said, "What's wrong, sweetie?"
"I opened the suitcase, and a cockroach ran across my hand. It was the grossest thing I've ever seen."
And this was coming from a girl that cleaned up an enormous shit brick out of my daughter's swimsuit just the day before.
I may be going out on a limb, but I'll bet the house that we won't be ever staying at the Buffalo Bill's Hotel and Casino again.
So we got back on the road, and made our way towards Vegas, and the Gold Coast Hotel. We tried to get the Orleans again because of the great pool, but they were booked up. They were both owned by the same company, so we knew we could still use the Orleans pool if the Gold Coast's sucked.
It only took us 40 minutes to get to Vegas. In retrospect, we should have called ahead to the Gold Coast and stayed there the extra night instead of Cockroach Towers. Annie pointed that out to me more than once.
We got there around 11:00, and the nice people at the Gold Coast let us check in early. But there was one tiny little thing they forgot to tell us when we made our reservations. There was construction going on at the hotel, and they hoped we wouldn't mind the jackhammers and shit outside our room all day long.
Crap, I'd just spent eight days in a van with four kids. I'd lost most of my hearing and the will to live many moons ago.
So we went up and found our room. Just to be safe, before we unpacked our suitcases, we inspected it for wildlife. Finding none, we got settled in.
We decided to go to the downtown area of Vegas, and see if the Fremont Street Experience was in operation. For those of you that don't know, it's a covered area of around six blocks, and they show real cool images on the ceiling, like this:
What we didn't know was that the Experience only happened at night, and during the day it looks like this:
So that sucked, but while we were down there, we did stop by the Golden Nugget, and see the world's largest, you guessed it, gold nugget. It looked eerily similar to the world's largest brown nugget that The Girl had deposited in her Baby Speedos at the beach yesterday.
That killed about 30 seconds. Time to move on.
Our next stop was Circus Circus, because we knew they had a huge arcade where the kids could maybe win some souvenirs. We actually had some fun there, because your chubby little pal is a Skeeball playing mother ripper. I was able to win stuffed toys for all the kids, and not spend an arm and a leg. I was so proud.
Next, we went next door to the Slots of Fun Casino, and all lunched on the 99 cent foot-long chili dog. That baby is huge, and surprisingly good. While I was eating, I took a moment to wonder what that chili dog would look like next week, when The Girl finally pooped again. I guessed probably about the same, minus the bun.
I may have been fixating on poop a little too much. But you really should have seen that motherlode The Girl left in her one-piece at the beach. Tough to get that picture out of my mind.
Anyway, after that we went back to the hotel, because it was 109 degrees, and shockingly The Girl wanted to go swimming. We checked out the Gold Coast pool, and it was tiny. So we got in the van, and drove the half mile over to the Orleans.
When we got there, I took off my shirt to go swimming, and the kids kind of gasped. I said, "What's wrong?"
"Dad, you look like a giant tomato."
I knew I had gotten a little too much sun at the beach the previous day, but I didn't realize how much. I was fried. The kids were right. I looked like a tomato. But not the healthy, ripe kind. More like a stewed tomato- all saggy and shit. Only with lots of fur (I look a little like a Chia Pet). I didn't know then, but that sunburn was going to jack up my sleep for the next week.
So we did the swimming thing for a couple of hours. I stayed in the shade most of the time, and rubbed immense amounts of sunblock on my lumpy crimson carcass. Nobody dropped a giant growler in their shorts, so it was a big afternoon.
We gathered our stuff to go back to the Gold Coast so we could clean up, have some dinner, and take the hotel shuttle to The Strip and see the only other thing we wanted to see for the evening: the beautiful fountains at the Bellagio.
When we got to the parking garage, we saw a bunch of police and firemen lined up at the doors leading out to our car. I thought maybe they were collecting early for Jerry's Kids.
Not so much...
Fucking bomb scare.
You have got to be shitting me. In the past week, I thought we had seen it all. Multiple mechanical failures on amusement park rides, traffic jams out the wazoo, missing an entire day at Seaworld, almost getting hit by a flaming, out of control trailer, a cockroach stampede, and several tragic poopie incidents. And now a goddamn bomb scare? Really?
"Sir, we don't know how long this is going to take. We'll need you to go on back into the casino, and we'll let you know when we get the 'all clear', or when your van explodes into several million pieces. You might want to steer clear of any glass for a bit. And please make sure you check the organ donor box on your driver's license. Welcome to Las Vegas."
We hung out for about 90 minutes. They hadn't found whatever they were looking for, and had no clue when the garage was going to open back up. We were all still in our swimming suits- we were just going to change when we got back to our room. I had a serious ball wedgie from that mesh thing inside a guy's swimsuit that holds his junk in place. Not good times...
So we finally opted to abandon the van, and take the shuttle that goes back and forth between the Orleans and the Gold Coast. We weren't going to use the car to go to the strip anyway, so hopefully we could pick it up later Friday night. Or at least identify a charred license plate for the police.
Just more improv on the run from the Sterner family. We'd gotten good at it.
After waiting a half hour for the shuttle (the hotels were only half a freaking mile apart, for Christ's sake- I assumed the driver was getting a hum job somewhere), we made it back to the Gold Coast. There were big lines at the buffet and other restaurants, and we sure couldn't drive anywhere else, so we went for the luxury dining experience: The Gold Coast bowling alley snack bar. Bitchin'.
I grew up in bowling alleys, so I think the food is great. Nothing like a big old burger and fries, still dripping the oil from the fryer that hasn't been changed in six years. The kids liked it, too. Annie wasn't nearly as impressed.
After consuming the Heart Attack in a Basket, we got back on the other shuttle that would take us to the Bellagio. When we got there, we noticed something straightaway. There aren't many families with little kids on The Strip on Friday nights. To steal a phrase from Jim Rome, we stuck out like a boner in sweatpants.
If you haven't seen the Bellagio fountain show, it's unbelievably gorgeous. They play different songs every 15 minutes, and the fountains go off in sync with the music. I know it sounds kinda gay, but you really have to check it out to see how impressive it is. I'll bet it cost at least $100 to build that mamma-jamma.
So we sat through a few songs, and then went back for the shuttle that would return us to the Orleans, where we'd find out if our van blowed up real good. I was actually surprised when we got there and the vehicle was still in one piece. It would have been the perfect end to our family vacation.
It was around 10:00 when we got back to the Gold Coast. Between the cucarachas and the WMD at the Orleans from earlier, Annie didn't even feel like going downstairs, hammering some Long Islands, and playing some Pai Gow. So I went stag for a little while.
I found a $10 table, and sat down (for you gambling gringos, that means you have to bet at least 10 bucks per hand). A couple of minutes later, a well dressed foreign guy sat down next to me, and laid out $5000 in cash to buy chips. I guessed he was from like Turkey, or Morocco, or maybe Jersey. For our purposes, I'll just call him Omar.
So they gave Omar a shitload of chips for his five grand, and he layed $1000 down for his first bet. Just try to imagine how insignificant my $10 bet looked next to Omar's. You've heard of penis envy? I had chip envy. Fuckin' foreigners...
To make things even worse, Omar then fired up an unfiltered Camel, and plopped his ashtray right down next to me. I think Las Vegas is the only place left in the world where you can still smoke indoors. I grew up with cigarette smoke wafting in my face, but I wasn't used to it anymore, and it bothered me- big time. I lightly waved my hand in front of my nose, just to give him a little hint. He either didn't notice or didn't give a shit, because the lung rocket stayed right there in the ashtray.
I knew it was petty, but it became important to me for Omar to lose. And he did just that on the first hand. He pushed out another grand. He lost again. Two thousand bucks had gone poof in about two minutes. I tied the dealer, or pushed, twice, so my $10 was still sitting there. Take that, sand jockey.
Omar muttered something I assumed was a swear word in Moroccan, and put out yet another $1000 bet. Poof...
To quickly review, Omar had just lost in three minutes around the same amount of money that we had just spent for the whole week of vacation. The good news was that I won my hand, and happily stacked both of those red five dollar chips on top of the eight others I had in front of me. Cha-ching!
Now Omar was pissed. He bet his last $2000, and I think put a curse on the dealer's goat. He took a huge drag off of his unfiltered Camel, and put it back down, where it continued to send smoke straight up my right nostril.
Come on, baby, one more time...
Poof.
In four minutes, Omar waved "ma arsalema" (that's buh-bye in Moroccan- thanks Wikipedia) to five thousand dollars. David Copperfield couldn't have made that shit disappear faster. I covered my mouth so he couldn't see me smile.
I hadn't been this happy since I set that world record for "burping the worm" in the shower all those years ago.
Omar then demonstrated that he could also swear in English. He got up, told the poor little Asian dealer to go make love to herself, and stomped off. But he did leave the Camel burning in the ashtray, just to be sure that I would have a spot on my lung next time I go in for a physical.
Thanks, Omar. Have a great weekend, you Middle Eastern piece of shit. Oh, and you might want to mix in some Mennen's Speed Stick.
After all the excitement, I stayed for another hour, actually made $80 for a change, and went upstairs to bed. We had a long drive the next day.
Saturday, July 26th- Green River, Utah
Saturday morning, we happily left Las Vegas, and headed back east towards home. It took us about three hours, but we finally got out of the goddamn desert heat, and into something a little more normal, like 90 degrees. Very slick planning on our part, that vacation in the middle of the summer.
We didn't want to drive the entire 12 hours home Saturday, so we thought we'd go about halfway, which was Green River, Utah. It sounded pretty- the perfect place to spend our final night of vacation.
Well, we were so very, very wrong one more time. Green River was just another boil on Mother Nature's ass. The whole town can't have a thousand people in it, and it's fugly. The river isn't green, it's this crappy brown color. But I guess "Shit River" wouldn't look very good in the travel brochures.
There were no fast food places in Shit River, so we went to one of the two restaurants in town. I can't remember the real name of the place, but we ended up calling it Sam 'n Ella's. (Say that name real fast. Try it again. Ah, there you got it.)
It was Saturday night, so the entire town was there, I think. Zebediah, and his seven wives (this was Utah, after all); Merle from the fillin' station; Skeeter, the town sheriff; the whole gang. I think I was in a little self-destructive phase, because I ordered a big burrito with green chili.
I'll spare you the details about how I reacted to the Sam 'n Ella's burrito. Let's just say that the porcelain in our hotel room toilet, the wallpaper in the bathroom, and my kids' olfactory senses will never be quite the same. I left an extra 50 cents for the maid on Sunday morning- she certainly earned that four bits. Holy jumpin' smokes...
Anyway, we got the hell out of Morman country early Sunday morning, and drove the last six hours home. I can't tell you how great it was to get back to my own bed, back to my own DVR, and back to a place that doesn't have a swimming pool.
It was also great to get away from the kids for a while. Don't get me wrong- I love my kids more than my DVR (well, it's close), but we had been together for nine days straight. It was time for us to spend some time apart. Like three weeks.
So just to review- this was the Sterner family at the start of the vacation (click photos to enlarge):
And this was the Sterner family after:
Well, boys and girls, that's the story of our summer vacation. Thanks for letting me get that out- I feel a little bit better.
I've had a bunch of people ask me if all the crap that I described in the first three installments actually happened, or was I making it up for the story? It does seem a bit far fetched, doesn't it?
Kids, I have a confession. In chapter three, activists didn't try to push me back into the sea while I was laying on the beach, and clear out my blowhole. I made that up. But other than that, everything else really happened. No shit.
Now that it's over, what would we do differently? If Tinkerbell could wave her magic wand, and we could change anything, what would it be? I have a few thoughts:
1) I don't think we'd plan something for every day of the vacation. There would be a day or two where we would just hang out, or spend a whole day at the beach. Some time where we would just play it by ear. We definitely crammed 10 pounds of shit in a five pound bag, timewise.
2) We wouldn't drive in the desert in the middle of July. We were kind of screwed, because we have such a short window between little league seasons. This was really the only time we could go, but it was a hot sonofabitch.
3) I imagine we wouldn't have stayed at Buffalo Bill's Hotel, Casino, and Cockroach Preserve. I'm almost sure on that one.
4) We wouldn't have gone to Universal Studios. It just wasn't worth it to deal with L.A. traffic. I'll never piss and moan about Denver traffic ever again. What a nightmare.
5) We wouldn't let the kids drink any liquids all week. We stopped 147 goddamn times to pee. Dehydration is a risk I'd be willing to take.6) I'd be taller. She's got a magic wand, right? I'm just saying...
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