Tuesday morning we slept in until around 10 o'clock or so My wife had cashed in an offer from some slot app she played on her phone to get us one comped night in a standard king room at Aria. She got an email saying our room was ready super early at like 11 AM. So we packed up some stuff in my backpack and her larger purse and headed across the street to catch the tram from Bellagio to Aria. We checked in using one of the kiosks and found the guest elevators to go check out our room on the 8th floor.
The room looked out towards the strip facing slightly southeast, so we had a view of Park MGM, MGM Grand, the Polo Towers, and Planet Hollywood. It was a very cool room with lots of fun technology to open the blinds and turn off and on the lights, but it felt like it was half the size of our Bally's room. I'd heard people rave about how comfy the beds were there, but it really wasn't significantly more comfortable than the bed at Bally's. In fact I liked the pillows at Bally's better. The view was way better though.
We stowed our stuff and hung up the clothes we planned to wear later that night and then made our way over to Cosmopolitan to try out Holstein's. This was one of our favorite places we ate this trip. My wife got her usual well done plain cheeseburger and I got their Gold Standard burger minus the tomato confit. We split a plate of delicious garlic parmesan fries. I got a chocolate malt that was topped with whipped cream and tiny malted milk balls and she was thrilled to discover that they served Pepsi. The best part of the experience though was the service. The staff was so friendly and attentive without being intrusive. And again....they kept the wife supplied with Pepsi the entire time we were there. The bill for the two of us was around $65, which is pricey for two burgers, some fries, and a couple drinks, but well worth it.
We stopped at the CVS next door to the Waldorf Astoria to grab some drinks and snacks for the room. The wife picked up a bath bomb for the big soaker tub in the room at the Aria. We headed back there and burned through about $150 in record time on a few unsuccessful slot games including another stab at Buffalo Gold, Kronos, Quick Hits, and some more $0.25 Double Top Dollar.
We had the group slot pull coming up with Matt Bridger that night at 9:00 and we didn't want to exceed our daily gambling budget, so we went back to the room and watched a little TV and took a short nap. About 6:30 PM I showered and got dressed in my fanciest casual duds for the evening's activities. We couldn't agree on a dinner spot so we headed across the sky bridge to the Miracle Mile Shops. After doing a complete circuit of the entire mall we decided to just get sandwiches and fries at the Earl of Sandwich. The wife was not pleased with my indecisiveness and insistence on checking out all the options.
We arrived at Cosmopolitan a little after 8 o'clock. Matt had asked the group pull participants to arrive at 8:30 so everyone could be accounted for and we could get things rolling at 9. To make things easy we all put $200 in any slot at Cosmo beforehand and then immediately cashed it out so instead of handling a bunch of cash he would just have 16 of the TITO tickets. On the group pull earlier in the week at the Plaza downtown they did it in the high limit slot area. Cosmo apparently refused to allow us to do it there because they didn't want their other high limit players to be bothered by the crowd and added noise. I laughed at the noise comment because the music at Cosmo was blaring and near ear splitting levels.
So the slot selected was a Dragon Link machine called Spring Festival. I think it was chosen because it had a maxed out $1,000 major. The machine was located right near the bottom of the escalator and not too far inside the door from the strip, so there was a lot of foot traffic and the crowd gathered around one player drew a lot of curiosity from passers by. The machine was set at $2 denomination at $20 a press. Each player had 10 spins, or pairs like my wife and me could split them 5 and 5. Once everybody had completed their 10 spins we divided the profits or loss. I won't steal the thunder from Matt's vlog so if you're interested check out the video here. (On the video about halfway through you can hear Matt say something like, "Excuse me they're trying to watch." It was because a lady had hilariously kind of elbowed her way to the front to see what all the fuss was about and rather loudly asked what was going on. I was surprised you couldn't really hear her on the video.)
We hung out a little afterwards and chatted with some of the other participants. Almost all of the others involved were from the UK and Ireland. We had a lovely time making small talk with two friendly young ladies from Sheffield. After collecting our money and getting a little advice from Matt about what denomination he usually plays on the Dancing Drums and 88 Fortunes we headed back to Aria. The wife turned in and I headed down to the poker room and got into a 1-3 no limit game. I repeated the same level of success at Bally's and cashed out down about $100 after the table we were at started to fall apart a couple of hours into the session.
I wound up hitting another bonus this time on the Buffalo Grand. I scored one of the small progressives for about $30 and then hit a 5X multiplier to make it $150. I won another hundred on a diamond something or other lock it link machine and then called it a night. For the third time my poor poker skills and lack of cards was rescued by the one armed bandits. I was starving and didn't want to stray too far or go anywhere that would take too long so I went back to the CVS just on the other side of the Waldorf Astoria and bought a sub sandwich, some chips, a candy bar and a big Gatorade. I quietly ate those at the desk in the room while watching Catfish on the TV and then crashed.
Final day coming in the next day or two.
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