tagryn | Las Vegas - Los Angeles vacation trip

This past week we flew to Vegas, drove to Los Angeles, and spent a day at Disneyland, among other things. I've uploaded photos from the trip to our FlickR page

* We flew on Virgin America, which had a nice 2-for-1 sale that we took advantage of. Overall it was pretty satisfactory (even with Donna twice attracting people to the seat in front of her who just had to recline the seat back all the way, even on a short SF-to-LA connecting flight). The planes are brand-new, with all leather seats. Nice. The VA 'Red' inflight entertainment system was pretty spiffy - this was my first flight where I was able to watch live satellite TV onboard. I do think it made the flight seem to go a little faster, even with the system losing individual channels' signals from time to time. The system also has an extensive music collection and realtime flight tracker map. While they do have USB and power ports, strangely my MP3 player wouldn't recharge even while plugged in. Oh, well.

* We rented our car from Dollar. The clerk basically said if anything goes wrong with the car, be prepared to pay bigtime - "if the car is damaged or impounded, you will continue to be charged full rental fee while it is in the shop", etc. They also wanted $10/day to add me as a driver, on top of the $125+ drop fee for doing a one-way rental to LA. Bleah. Donna also didn't like the car - a Dodge Avenger - said it had a huge blindspot, and it also gives this loud *HONK* when you're locking it. Not good.

* Vegas was pretty good. We stayed at the Silverton casino, which is far enough off the Strip that the service is generally friendly even if you aren't a high roller (but still close enough in to see the snow on the mountains) I hit a $144 jackpot on the "Star Wars" penny slots at Planet Hollywood - I was actually playing 5 cents a spin, but got frustrated and just did max bet to get it over with. Sure enough, I got the Death Star bonus game and it paid big (well, big for 1c slots, anyway). Donna also did pretty well on a fun & cheerful new slot called "Crazy Lemmings" whose bonus game was happy lemmings diving off a cliff. But, they do it in a happy manner - yay!

* The breakfast cafe and conservatory at Bellagio was high quality as always, and we did the Wynn dinner buffet for a change. Very nice. I decided to use the opportunity to try some foods I'd never eaten before:
Sturgeon : saltier than I like
Mahi-mahi : OK, nothing I'd go out of my way for
Octopus: Didn't really taste like anything.
Squid: Ditto. I was expecting them to taste more like eel, which was just nauseating, but they were OK.
Asian pears: fruitier, distinctive taste from Bartlett pears. Donna said this was due to it being mixed
with "lychee" nuts.

* We saw more than a couple Ron Paul campaign billboards in the Mojave desert driving from Vegas to LA.

* Disneyland was a lot of fun. We managed to do most of the attractions we wanted to hit before the rain came pouring down in the afternoon. I liked the revisions they made to Pirates of the Caribbean: the additions based on the movies were just that, additions, and didn't distract or remove from the theming at all. We again ate probably my favorite burgers at "Test Pilot Diner" in California Adventure, and also bought a really neat beach towel with the Grand California hotel logo on it for only $20; that's currently serving as the throw on our living room couch.

* On Thursday we stayed over with our friends Ron and Meg in the Valley, after driving back from Anaheim in the morning. We stopped and tried the Beard Papa cream puff shop in the Santa Ana mall, but they only had vanilla flavor and I didn't find it to be nearly as good as the chocolate ones I tried in NYC last year. Ron and I went to see "Cloverfield", and found it sufficently amusing once we got used to the shaky-cam filming style.