I slept horribly at Fremont last night and finally give up trying at 6:30 AM and get started with my day.
Start out with a loss on Buffalo Cash Express. Head over to Four Queens and for some reason, play dollar Double Double Bonus video poker.
OH HEY LOOKIT.
Continue reading
As I am continuing to post about this trip, I decided to break off my rant about being stranded in New Orleans from my actual post about New Orleans. My New Orleans recap will be the next post.
So for the New Orleans portion of this trip, I worked for a few days and then I had planned to spend Saturday here to have a full day to check out the city. I lost a portion of that after getting a call from Amtrak. My next train is to Memphis. That train is cancelled.
I am told I can go to Jackson, MS to catch the train. It is not running between NOLA and Jackson, but continues on my route from Jackson. How do I get to Jackson? The woman on the phone said I had to get myself there. Wait, what? There is no way this is a real fucking phone call. You are doing NOTHING to get me to Jackson?
I have never heard of Jackson in my life.
So Google it is.
I took a 30 day trip on Amtrak back in September/October. You can find the itinerary HERE.
I have been a total lazy slob with getting these posts up. I feel like I am forever apologizing for this. I wonder if you were to Google “lazy slob blogger” if mine would come up first.
So in preparation of this trip, I decided to book a hotel near Penn Station the night before leaving. I haven’t been riding the subway since Covid made my job remote. I have probably taken it 5 times total since March of 2020. I didn’t want to deal with leaving my apartment at 6:00 AM and dealing with train delays. So I booked a night at the New Yorker hotel.
I had matched from Total Rewards Diamond to Wyndham Diamond for absolutely no reason other than I could. Well it turns out I got a free upgrade to a suite. Although this is wasted on me, I loved the view. My only trips to Manhattan since March of 2020 are to the first stop on the subway, down in Chinatown, to get my roots straightened.
I was also offered, as Diamond, a late check out. I couldn’t take advantage though as I had to leave early to catch my train to High Point, NC. Continue reading
So a few months ago, Amtrak had a sale on USA Rail Passes. Rather than the regular $499 rate, they were $299. I bought one on impulse. I was not sure if this was the best or worst idea ever. I am still not sure.
You can find the details HERE or you can read on where I explain it in my own words.
So you have a pass that is good for 30 days. You can take 10 train rides. Since my pass was a special offer, I had a very clear use by date. Normally, it is good for 120 days after purchase (30 days after first segment is traveled).
Thing I did not know before booking: Amtrak does not have WiFi west of Chicago. So my plans of working from a train were foiled. I had to be a bit more creative. I also needed to make sure I could be online completely during working hours. Not like arriving in a city at 4:00 am and not be able to check into a hotel / not be able to find somewhere open to work from. Same with checking out of hotels. I didn’t want to take trains that left at like 3:00 PM if I had to check out of a hotel at 11:00 AM. Most of my work is video calls, I didn’t want to be making these from a train station. Most sit in places, such as Starbucks, have their dining rooms closed because of Covid.
I only wanted to sleep in states I had never slept in before. I wanted to go to New Orleans. That was really all I needed to get started. Continue reading
Las Vegas day six starts out at Fremont Hotel in beautiful Downtown Las Vegas. I can never talk enough about how much I love waking up here. It just feels so good. Looking out the window, seeing Vegas. Knowing how quiet it is. Thinking of all the people who are just crawling to bed after having a winning night. Fate moving around invisibly to possibly smile on me today. And then the iced coffee shortly in my future…
I am up at 7:30 and out at 8:30.
I lost $100 on Ultimate X video poker and then switched to Supertimes Pay video poker. I put in a $100 bill and went down and then back up before cashing out at $100. Sometimes wins like this feel better than an actual win. I love being saved.
I grab McDonalds for breakfast and am back in my room at 10:10 for a nap.
When I wake up again, I walk over to The D. I don’t know why I love playing here since points are shorted and I don’t even drink alcohol to make up for it. Thanks to Covid, every other machine at Long Bar is shut off. This unfortunately includes the machine that gave me Aces with a Kicker twice back in December, both times holding only one Ace. I sit next to her and pet her a bit before playing.
I hit for 7/9 on Cleopatra Keno for $100.
Hi!
If you are reading this, that means you signed up to get notified of new blog posts by email. It also means I have failed at turning off email notifications.
LET ME EXPLAIN.
I am trying some new things over here. First: We all agreed that you guys would rather read one big trip report at once, than having it posted one day at a time. So I have been doing this.
But this is causing a couple of issues:
So what I am going to start doing with the trip report I am working on now (it will be finished before I leave in 3 days for another trip), is make 16 separate posts, but post them all at once, linking to “next post” on each page. This way, each day is searchable by Google. And you still get to read them all in one sitting.
Now. I don’t want you guys to have to get sixteen emails whenever I make a new post, one for each day. I also will be breaking up some older trip reports that I posted in one post, so that those are also searchable. I definitely do not want you to wake up one day and have 8293748374 emails from me.
So I tried turning off email notifications and this is a test post. If you get a notification of this post, I failed. And I am not going to try again because I have already wasted 384783 hours of my life trying to figure out how to do this.
So if you do not want 834282437 emails from me, you can unsubscribe. If you do want 8324873 emails from me, well bless your heart.
And of course, if I am doing this right (crossed fingers) then I was successful in turning off notifications and I am just typing to myself because you will never see this.
Here we go in 3…2…1…
Sigh, it failed.
Taking this train in Myanmar was one of the top reasons for my visit. Seventeen hours on a train is a very long time. So is 20. When I took the 24 hour trip to Lhasa a few years ago, I documented what I did during that ride. What I did not document though, was the amount of thoughts that went through my head. Ever wonder what goes through someone’s head when they are on public transport for an insane amount of hours? Well I can tell you.
The overnight train from Yangon to Bagan is supposed to be 17 hours, it ended up being 20 hours.
I knew I had to do this trip before I even finished reading this post that introduced it to me. Oh man. This looks FANTASTIC. The whole idea of your commute being this insane experience you would never forget. The second I finished reading that post, I had to email the author to tell her about the irony of stumbling across it on the same day I read a post on a Las Vegas message board where someone had cancelled a reservation for a Strip hotel because she saw photos online where you could see the toilet when you opened the bathroom door. It was right out there and not tucked behind a wall. The horror!
I booked a ticket going from Yangon to Bagan. I knew that the sleeper car is a separate car that is only attached if they sell tickets for it. I ran the risk of being trapped in here with other people. It is not internally connected to the other cars on the train. You cannot walk through to get to anywhere. How many beds had to sell to attach the car? The booking agent I used stated on their website that if you wanted to guarantee a sleeper car would be attached, you could book all four beds for yourself. I am not sure why I did not do this. But I didn’t. And then spent time wondering who would be in the car with me. I was hoping to not spend the entire 17 hours being paid attention to for being a Westerner.
I arrived at the train station and took the obligatory photo of the “Warmly Welcome & Take Care of Tourists” sign.
Hello and Happy 2017! Let’s start this year off by actually publishing a new post! In 2016, I published a whopping sixteen posts for the entire year. This is going to change in 2017.
A lot of bloggers start out the year with the same promise and it is very common to see bloggers of all sorts set out to publish a new post every day for the entire month. There is even an online guide for topic suggestions to take you throughout the entire year, which you can find here. Ironically enough, today’s writing prompt is travel related with “What’s the 11th item on your bucket list?” I can actually find the answer to that in my drafts folder, where I have an unfinished post that contains my bucket list. I had this really cool idea that I would publish it and as I visited the places on it, I could insert links to the posts I wrote about each place. But I never got that far because lazy.
(In case you are interested, the 11th item on my bucket list is the world’s largest Beagle.)
My blog turned two last weekend! I probably should have posted this on it’s birthday, but I was too busy being a delinquent mother and gambling away in Atlantic City.
Last year, I did a post about things I learned in my first year of blogging. This year, I learned one huge thing and that is I am cursed.
Some things that have happened to me in the past year:
I lost all my non-published content. I work on four computers. One is my PC at home, my preferred computer to work on. One is my work computer. One is my netbook that goes everywhere with me because it is small, but it also sucks and is frozen all the time. The fourth is my actual laptop, which works wonderfully but is too big to travel with.
Going back and forth between all these computers should not be a problem. But for me, it is. Why? Because the internet will not work on my home PC. That leads to this:
Everyone: If your wifi works in your apartment, you should be able to connect a cable from the modem into your PC
Me: Yes, I know. I used to do this. But one night I defragmented my computer and for some reason, it lost a lot of abilities, including going online. I also lost the ability to choose 256 colors, or change my theme, and everything now defaults to Times New Roman, which I hate.
Everyone: But if the wifi works, the internet should work
Me: It does, but the COMPUTER IS BROKEN.
Everyone: Maybe you just need a new cable
Me: (smashes head into keyboard)
