I did that. You still have to listen in order to get the stuff.
I watched the John Oliver piece on timeshares that JohnGalt recommended. You should watch it also. I thought I knew this stuff, but I learned a lot. If you own a timeshare, it goes to your heirs when you die and unless they fill out the proper paperwork they can get stuck with it. And the companies offering to get you out of timeshares are often crooks also, taking your money and then disappearing.
The comments are even good. Several people said that they had to threaten to call 911 to get out of the sales talks.
The husband whose wife was The Queen of Versailles in that documentary made his money with timeshares, right? Scum of the earth.
With a timeshare it’s not just the monthly payment, there is an annual payment, a club fee, an exchange membership and an exchange fee, plus a resort fee, housekeeping charge and parking fee. Sometimes there is a special assessment which is an additional fee, and all these fees and charges increase at a rate greater then inflation and once you sign, it is nearly impossible to get out of.
This is precisely the reason we’ve spend more than 50 times more than we’ve ever spent on airfare for a year to buy a 5th wheel and Pickup. There’s no TSA grope, no cattle car, no ‘wake at 3 am to make an 8 am flight’, the bathroom is clean, the beer is cold, and the seats are always comfortable.
We still fly (it kills me when we’re travelling and NOT using the camper, but what are ya gonna do?) but my tolerance for it has dropped significantly.
Well, we are a week into our two week vacation in Vegas. We are staying at Resorts World on the north end of the strip, and it’s very nice. It only opened in 2021, which was why we picked it. We knew it would be clean, have decent ventilation for Covid, etc. And all that is true. No complaints at all. Well, Imhave complaints about some of their technology, but I’ll save that for other threads.
The prices are high, but not as high as I thought. You can get a decent entree’ in a nice restaurant here for under $30. And there’s a Denny’s across the street for days when you just want a cheap meal.
Unfortunately, Vegas seems to have ruined blackjack. The games now pay out 6:5 on a blackjack, which makes them about three times as bad for average players and impossible to beat for advantage players. The games are dealt from 6-deck shoes or continuous shuffle machines, which makes card counting impossible.
The poker here is also a bust for us. One of the reasons we picked the place is because they advertised a bunch of limit poker games, and my wife doesn’t like pot limit and no limit and won’t play them. Unfortunately, the limit games are only theoretical. They haven’t actually opened a limit table since we got here, and I’m not going to play and abandon my wife, so we haven’t played at all. They do have a ‘mixed’ 4-8 limit that sometimes runs, but I’m not sitting down at a poker table to play games I’ve never even heard of.
I looked at the pay tables for video poker, and they are bad as well. The best I could find was just over 97% payback. You can come out ahead on comps though, because drinks here are really expensive. Expect $10 for a beer and $16 to 25 for a mixed cocktail. A glass of wine is 17. But you can play .25 video poker and get your drinks comped, which we did. And our price for the stay included $35 in drink credits per day, so when you include all that it’s not bad.
We saw Jay Leno at the Wynn on our anniversary, and it was a great show. We’re still planning to see the various museums, take in another show or two, and spend some time around the pool as it’s going to get hot here in the next week.
Yesterday we walked over to Circus Circus, and man was that place depressing. It’s old, crowded, and full of screaming kids and inattentive parents letting their kids run amok while the parents gamble their future away at the slots. Ugh.
All in all though, it’s a great time and how much money you spend is completely up to you. There’s enough to do here that isn’t gambling that you could entertain yourself every day. Quad off-road adventures in the Mojave, Tours of Hoover Dam and the Grand Canyon, ziplining, aviation experiences (you can fly an Extra-300 aerobatic plane with an aerobatic instructor and fly an entire airshow routine including Lomcevaks and snap rolls and all the rest, pulling up to 8 g’s… I might still do that one, but it’s expensive).
We are going to go to ‘Battlefield Vegas’, which is an indoor/outdoor shooting range where you can shoot just about every military weapon there is, including machine guns, sniper rifles, etc. You can even shoot an M60 tank round or drive a tank over a car is you have the money. It’s obviously not for everyone. First person shooter gamers would love it, though, They have packages where you can shoot every gun that’s in popular video cames like Counterstrike or Call of Duty.
All in all, we’re happy to be here, although the gambling side of Vegas is deteriorating for anyone who understands gambling. The games are better in Edmonton.
I completely agree. Many casinos now have only gimmicking games that resemble blackjack. I don’t mind the 6-deck shoe, but I do want full payment for blackjack and the other traditional rules.
Full pay? Only off-Strip. Try South Point.
Sam - Stay away from Denny’s and eat at Peppermill instead (also across the street). But only order 1 entree! You’ll still not finish it. Huge, they are. But the drinks are potent and reasonable. Nothing like an omelet the size of a Buick and a Scorpion Bowl to kick-start your morning!
I just mentioned this in another thread, but Ri Ra, in the indoor mall between Mandalay Bay and Luxor, makes a dang good full Irish breakfast that’ll fill you up for most of the day and comes in right around $20.
Circus Circus has been simply appalling for 20 years now. But their fancy restaurant, cleverly named “The Steakhouse” used to be truly great, despite the tawdry surroundings.
I can’t vouch for it in recent years, but some things in Vegas last a lot longer than it seems like they should have. This is probably one of those things. If you want the classic experience of tuxedo-ed waiters serving dry-aged beef amongst dark wood walls and dark red leather seating, give it a whirl.
As @silenus said, skip Denny’s and go to the Peppermill. Which I have visited recently and can vouch for.
Definitely a surviving piece of late 1960s / early 1970s Vegas and one of the few such pieces remaining. Though it’ll probably get bulldozed for the next big Strip project around there.
The food is unspectacular but adequate and decently priced. Much better than a Denny’s though. The real attraction is the bar, especially in the evening. It’s small, intimate, and oh so 1970s disco-sexy. The flaming water firepit / conversation pit just totally makes it.
We will try the Peppermill. Sounds good.
Do that, and quickly. You won’t be sorry!
Thanks for the review. We’re staying at Resorts World for one night in August, to see Katy Perry there.
Circus Circus is an odd thing. In the last 20 years, Stardust and Riviera have gone, Bally’s, Mirage, and Imperial Palace have rebranded, and Sahara closed, became SLS, closed again, and went back to being Sahara, and so much of the rest of the old Strip has vanished, but Circus Circus just stands there unchanged, a relic of the days when dodgy motor courts and short squat casinos dominated the Strip. How it stays in business while it’s sitting on top of such presumably valuable real estate is beyond me.
I have heard that the steakhouse is still as good as you remember it, though.
Emphasis added by me.
Has anybody been to the Mirage lately? I’m considering a vacation there in early May. It was my always-go-to before Covid, but I see that it’s now a Hard Rock property instead of an MGM one, and some things have changed. For anybody who has stayed there, or even just walked through, have they changed for the worse, or for the better, in your opinion?
One thing I always enjoyed about the Mirage was the Dolphin Bar, out by the pool, but now the Mirage’s website doesn’t mention it at all, and Yelp tells me that it is permanently closed. Is it really permanently closed, or was it just closed for winter and will reopen soon?
Enquiring minds, and all.
Do statements like this not come off as incredibly snobbish to anyone else? Besides which, caring what other people like (so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone) just seems to weird to me Sure, you can say Vegas hurts people, but Phil? Not my thing, but I don’t start threads to basically deride and insult anyone who does like those things.
It’s paid for.
As far as I know, Circus Circus is the only property on the Strip that isn’t servicing a rather large debt. The land, the buildings, the parking lots…all are owned free and clear. The place is a total dump, but it attracts the cheapskates with kids and that’s a guaranteed money-maker.
As for Mirage…expect massive construction to begin just in time for the economy to collapse. Again. Hard Rock is planning on building one of their Guitar towers on the south side of the property. If you want to see the Mirage as you remember it, better travel soon. My sister-in-law stayed there a couple of weeks ago and had zero complaints. No idea about the Dolphin Bar.
Good to hear about The Steakhouse. Next time I’m in town for work (if there is a next time; retirement is edging closer by the day) I’ll do it.
As to the rest of your post, very well said. At this point it’s literally the last significant vestige of the 1970s - 1980s Vegas Strip.
I was living there when they build that giant pink domed amusement park out back. Which really revitalized the place, but it seems they’ve not done much to the place since.
I suspect it’s simply the casino equivalent of the slumlord mentality: invest exactly zero in the facility, milk it for all the revenue you can while you can, and meanwhile you’re earning a nice percentage return on the land appreciation even if you can’t monetize that quite yet.
Had COVID and some of the earlier financial disasters not occurred, the time to sell that lot and raze Circus Circus would already have happened.
With the advent of @Sam_Stone’s Resort World, Circus Circus is the last large buildable lot along the upper strip. I predict It’ll get the axe once we come out of the current economic uncertainty.
Not quite. There’s the old Frontier lot across the street from Wynncore, the lot Peppermill is sitting on and the lot just north of Fountainbleau, where they are rumored to be looking at for a new WNBA arena complex. Plus the festival grounds opposite Sahara.
Right, and something to touch upon also:
The CC management can look around their neighborhood and observe what happened to many, many best-laid plans for the New Big Best Thing in the North Strip. Huge lots that remained razed for years and years and nearly-finished buildings that were just abandoned where they were. Until they can see that it’s worth it (or someone shows up with a pile of billions and no sense), they’ll hold back.
I very much like RW.
RW is what I’d call a fourth generation casino. It has the interesting feature of being extremely wide open and very brightly lit and using a lot of light colors, making it seem far less claustrophobic than other places.
The only place in Vegas I know of that consistently spreads limit is the Orleans, which is fun to visit but you wouldn’t want to stay there. Aria spreads limit at busy times.
The 6:5 blackjack thing is immensely irritating, though. You’ll see three-zero roulette too. But people will play those games so I guess they’ll keep doing it. I did find some 3:2 games at Paris that had early surrender.