Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Flying for Fun & Profit #3
Back home. Sun, 28 Dec 2026, 9pm.

Well that was easy. The mileage run I thought would chew up part of the day and all evening got done in just a few hours— thanks to finding a quick turnaround flight back from Los Angeles. I could've been home over an hour ago but I decided, since it was before 7:30 when I landed in San Jose, that I'd like to enjoy dinner out with Hawk. Now it's 9pm and we're back home, unpacked (for very small values of unpacking; basically I just took my computer out of my shoulder bag!) and relaxing.

For dinner we went to California Pizza Kitchen a few miles away. That was my pick because I was planning to eat at the CPK in Terminal 1 at LAX. The CPK there is actually more attractive now than it was a few years ago thanks to renovations, but oh! the prices. I took a peek at their menu while I was dancing the hokey pokey. They want $26 for a pizza! I figured with that and two airport-priced beers I'd be out $60 just for a basic dinner for one. Instead Hawk and I enjoyed a dinner for two near home, including two beers and an appetizer in addition to two meals, and the total was only $80.

Oh, and I just checked— the miles are already posted to my account! I now have A-List Preferred status through 2026. 😎

Thanksgiving triplog #17
Mechanicsburg, PA · Fri, 28 Nov 2025. 2pm.

After my plans to see my cousins fell through today I was at wits' end for what to do with myself. Staying around the house with my pokey inlaws is stultifying. So I knew I wanted to go out. But... to do what? Today is Black Friday, so going shopping would be on brand... except there's nothing I want to buy. And trolling around stores on this supposedly busiest day of the year seems like it would be more frustrating. (I'm skeptical about whether it's the busiest day of the year anymore, but that doesn't change the equation that shopping today is likely to be more frustrating than enjoyable.)

Hawk seemed to be looking for an excuse to get out the house, too, because when I suggested I might go out to eat for lunch, she agreed to join me. She agreed to join me for pizza, even. We found a well rated pizzeria a few miles away and headed there first.

Getting pizza in central Pennsylvania was a bit of culture shock. The shocker wasn't the pizza itself. It was east coast style pizza, which is exactly what I expected... though maybe a bit bland compared to what I expected. (Pizza with my mom and sister a few days ago in Virginia was way richer.) The shocker was the price. A lunch combo with two slices and a drink was $8 for cheese slices, $9 for pepperoni. And the slices were huge. That kind of meal back home would be literally twice the price.

After stuffing ourself on more pizza than we believed we could eat we considered again going shopping somewhere. Hawk did have a bead shop in mind, so we drove over to that in Mechanicsburg's quaint downtown area. The old fashioned stores there were empty, and street parking was easy. We considered shopping somewhere again after that but decided just to go home instead. We'd had enough of a break from the house.

Our kitchen pantry has been out of service for the past several weeks waiting on plumbing repairs for the toilet. Until just recently we've been limping along with the pantry contents stacked up on one end of our dining room table. We never intended that to be a long-term solution... but we also never expected it to take the plumbers nearly eight weeks to come back around and start the repairs. So late last week we shopped online and ordered a couple of inexpensive shelves to put in the dining room as a temporary measure.



The shelves arrived Sunday night. We started putting them together almost right away.

Yes, like most furniture today— most affordable furniture, anyway— these shelves arrived in a flat-pack box and we had to assemble them ourselves. In the photo above and the first one below you can see us bolting things together with the help of hex wrenches (included).



What do I mean by affordable furniture? Well, as we were looking at various comes-in-a-flat-box, assembly-required shelves on Amazon Hawk asked, "Why don't we just go to Hoot Judkins and get another bookshelf like that nice one we have upstairs?"

The reason we don't is that two-shelf bookshelf— which, BTW, is solid wood— cost $300... 10 years ago. The same item probably costs $500 today. These shelves are $50 apiece.

And these are on the pricier end for what they are. The vertical frames are metal, not particle board, and the shelf planks are real wood, also not particle board. If we'd wanted particle-board shelves we could've paid as little as $30 apiece.



Once we got the two shelves assembled on Sunday night and loaded up, moving most of the pantry contents off our dining room table, we decided we'd like a third shelf! Yes, these are really sturdy, and the fit and finish nice. Plus, they do fit neatly under the kitchen counter overhang (no accident; I measured) and the black-and-dark-wood colors match our dining table. We ordered a third shelf Sunday night, and it arrived less than 24 hours later, on Monday around dinnertime. We assembled it promptly, and— after posing it for the photo above— filled it up with pantry contents

It's a bit ironic that we left our pantry stacked up atop our dining table for 8 weeks before buying these shelves, and now after we've had them just a day or two the plumbers are here, working on the bathroom, today! It kinda seems like a waste of $150 for these shelves. But I knew the timing would be a risk when I bought them, which is why I carefully selected these shelves for their size, looks, and quality. Once we get the pantry back in order— which hopefully we can do in just a few days, now— we'll redeploy two of these shelves to hold some of the overflowing materials in Hawk's crafting space. The third shelf we'll probably keep here in the dining room, tucked under the kitchen bar, to hold overflow that would otherwise clutter the dining room.

Phoenix Getaway travelog #13
Back home · Tue, 22 Sep 2025. 6:30pm

It's around 6:30pm on Tuesday and we're home now from our Phoenix 4-day getaway. Yeah, we left after a half day today; maybe not even. We bailed from the hotel pools at noon, checked out before 1pm, had plenty of time at the airport, landed just after 5pm, and were home before 6. Now I'm unpacked and have had a chance to relax. That's the short version of it, anyway. The long version? Yeah, there's some funny stories to tell.

First, no, we didn't bail right after a slow morning waiting for the sun to come out. That was Monday morning. I'm skipping over a few half-finished blogs in my backlog to push this one out to set the context in case I need to start writing about something else, like, I dunno, work, this week.

12¢ for Electrons

I posted as part of this trip that our rental car was an electric vechicle, a Hyundai Ioniq 5. In that blog I mostly complained about how cumbersome and expensive it is to recharge an EV if you don't own it. Well, I decided since we weren't doing too much driving around Phoenix, just a handful of short trips, I wouldn't need more electrons than the full charge it came with. I decided I'd pay whatever cost the rental company charges for a recharge. Yeah, I figured they'd charge me more for the convenience, but given how inconvenient it is to sign up for a single charge at a commercial charging station I figured it'd be worth it.

It's was 12 cents.

"Oh, 12 cents per kilowatt hour?" I asked when the attendant at the rental depot told me that. "That's a great rate. The commercial stations I found with your app were $0.48/kwh and higher without a big up-front subscription."

No, he meant it was 12 cents. Total.

That's what the bill showed, anyway. Fuel charge: $0.12.

I'm sure either the staffer punched something in wrong or the rental company has its POS systems programmed wrong. We'll see if they come back with a bigger charge later as a correction.

An Easier Way to Fly. And the Lady in Seat 2D has a Mouse.

We reached the airport terminal with over an hour to pass before our flight would start boarding. Hawk went to the gate while I stopped for a late lunch outside security. We met up again at the gate, with plenty of time to spare.

It's always kind of boring sitting around the airport. Once aboard the flight we were already pretty much at peak boredom so I pulled out our stuffed hawk, "Winter", for us to play with. Hawk buckled him in to the seat between us for takeoff.



Later I perched Winter on my knee. He didn't get quite as much attention there as Baldy did on our flight home from Toronto a few weeks ago. Maybe that's because Winter is smaller. Or maybe it's because I wasn't in seat 1D where everyone boarding could see him.

Late in the flight I noticed the lady sitting across the aisle and half a row up from me giving me a lot of side-eye. Then I noticed that she was holding in her hands a stuffed mouse toy. Haha, red tail hawks totally eat mice! I thought about telling her Winter wouldn't prey on her mouse without our permission but I wasn't sure how much she wanted to play along with the stuffed animal circle of life. 🤣

$104 to Park in the Nosebleed Section

I groused on the front end of this trip about the terrible parking spot I got at the airport. Understand, this isn't simply, "Wanh, airports are expensive!" or, "Wanh! I had a long walk!" This is a situation where it's like I paid for seats near home plate at the ball game then got stuck up in the nosebleed section.



Well, when we landed this afternoon at SJC airport it was even more obvious how bad our parking spot was. The lot on Tuesday afternoon was only about 2/3 full, and only a scattering of cars were out in the nosebleed spaces. And BTW, in the photo above I've already walked across at least 4/5 of the lo before snapping the picture. That's our car out by the fence at the far end. And we paid $104 for that space.

Well, I guess if we average it with 12 cents for electrons it comes out to a reasonable price. 😂

Canada travelog #22
Back at the hotel · Wed, 27 Aug 2025. 8am.

This morning we chose to eat breakfast in the room. No, it's not some sumptuous room service spread; it's groceries we shopped for last night and/or brought from home in our luggage. We bring our own because we're leery of hotel breakfasts. They're generally either cheap crap or eye wateringly expensive. Sometimes they manage to be both. For example, the breakfast buffet at the hotel near Toronto airport was $20 for bland scrambled eggs, lukewarm sausage, and an assortment of stale breads. And will they even have much we want? We're both picky eaters about traditional US breakfast foods.

On this trip the cost factor disappears. At Hilton Garden Inns I get breakfast for two for free as an elite status perk. So those bland scrambled eggs, lukewarm sausage, and assortment of stale breads are gratis. 😂 But we thought maybe we could do better shopping for ourselves. We bought a few items at the grocery store last night. Unfortunately the verdict this morning is that the grocery food is all bland, too. 😞 So tomorrow morning we'll probably switch back to the buffet.

It's odd that breakfast is weak here at the hotel as dinner was surprisingly on point. By the time we checked in two nights we were too tired to go back out— it had been a long day with waterfalls and waterfails—so we sat at the bar for dinner. Hawk had a plate of spring rolls as her meal with a slice of apple pie for dessert. I enjoyed a Caesar salad with grilled steak and a slice of cheesecake for dessert. Oh, and I washed it down with a couple pints of a local beer, Ambear Ale, and a glass of wine.

As much as we enjoyed dinner at the hotel restaurant two nights ago it was also spendy. I mean, not like financing options for DoorDashing a burrito spendy, but the kind of meal we only treat ourselves to maybe twice a month. So last night we went cheap. Like, fast food cheap. Ontario turns out to have plenty of franchises of one of my favorite fast food restaurants from back home, Popeye's. I enjoyed a chicken tenders combo with a side of freshly made onion rings. I don't think they've done fresh onion rings in the US for years now. And the combo was cheaper in Canada than back home— by about 25%. Wow.

Well, enough chatting about food. We've got another busy day ahead. Today we're driving down to visit Niagara Falls! That's the other part of why we decided to eat breakfast in the room. We figured it'd be faster, helping us hit the road sooner to have more time enjoying the falls.

I've been trying to get a wine tasting trip going for a while. Not a big trip, just a local trip, as there are more than a dozen wineries in the foothills and up the near side of the Santa Cruz mountains near where I live. (There are also multiple dozen wineries 45-60 minutes in the other direction, in the Livermore Valley, but I toured that region extensively several times years ago. I've spent way less time visiting wineries in the mountains I can literally see from my house.) And when I say I've been trying to get this trip going for a while I mean both "for a couple of months" and "for several years". 😰

The "for a couple of months" part is because I've been waiting for the right opportunity: a weekend with nice weather when we didn't have conflicting plans and when, ideally, I could find a friend to do tastings with.

Yesterday was finally the day! A buddy and I visited a few wineries in the mountains and had a great time, enjoying the wine, the camaraderie, and the weather. Our first stop, after grabbing a quick lunch together in town, was David Bruce Winery in Los Gatos, in mountains above San Jose.



Why wait for nice weather? I mean, why not? 😂 But seriously, wineries are definitely open in shitty weather, too. And I've had some memorable experiences doing wine tasting when it's gloomy and cold outside but warm and intimate inside an old time-y building with a fire going in the fireplace and a glass of good red wine in my hand.

My idea for this trip was to go on a warm, clear afternoon so we could drop the top on the convertible and enjoy the drive through the mountains as well as the wine. And that's exactly the weather we had on tap for this weekend. ...The last few weekends, too, but I either had conflicting plans for those or didn't make plans in time.

Speaking of making plans in time, it was only Friday night I called a couple of friends to see about going wine tasting on Saturday. Damn procrastination. One already had drinking plans for Friday night and didn't think he'd be able to get up in time Saturday. The other, Anthony, also had drinking plans Friday night— in fact, he choked on a shot of liquor when he answered the phone and said "Hello" 🤣— but he's a lot younger so he figured he'd snap back just fine by Saturday morning. 💪



David Bruce is a beautiful winery. As you can see in the first photo above it's not much to look at from the parking lot. It looks kind of like a stone behemoth half-buried in the hillside. But that's also part of its beauty. The designers created natural cooling for the winemaking process by using heavy natural materials and locating it half underground. And all the greenery around it helps it blend into the natural landscape of the hills. The second pic above I took as we walked along the terrace to the tasting room.

Reservations Required (Also: We're Married Now)

I'd had to call ahead for a reservation for wine tasting. That's one thing that's different about wine tasting now vs. years ago.... It used to be you only needed an appointment for a private, high-end tasting or a tour— and even those you could even sign up for on the day of, very often. Now wineries ask for reservations even for basic tastings. So I made reservations with 3 wineries for Saturday.

David Bruce I had to call on the phone at 11am (when they opened) because their online ressy system wouldn't accept day-of reservations. The coordinator I spoke to hemmed and hawed as she dug up the appointments book. She sure made it seemed like they were squeezing us in. Yet when we arrived at 1pm the winery the parking lot was less than 20% full. There were only three small groups in the tasting area, and two of the couples were leaving.



As a coordinator sat us on the terrace overlooking the hillside with glasses of rosé to start, we both chuckled as the reservation card set out for us. "We're married now!" Anthony texted to both of our spouses. 🤣

Taste 'em All, Buy a Few Bottles Each

The winery offered two choices for tasting. We figured since we're married now we could each order a different flight and then share it with one another. I even joked that we could intertwine arms as we did so. Spoiler: we didn't. 🤣

We generally liked all the wines poured at David Bruce. The reisling was light and gently fruity. It was on the dry side of the reisling variety but with natural sweetness coming from the subtle fruit flavors. That was nice because it didn't have the syrupy mouth feel that comes along with sweeter reislings due to their residual sugar content. Anthony bought a bottle of that because he liked it and thought his wife would really like it, too. I considered it but opted to spend my chips on the pinot noir.

Speaking of pinot noir, there were four pinot noir examples on the tasting menu. One of the flights was just 4 pinots. Actually five, if you count the freebie rosé of pinot noir they started us with. (The rosé is shown in the pic above.) I generally liked all of them. For me the top two were the Russian River pinot (grapes grown in the Russian River appellation of Sonoma County) and the estate pinot (possibly growing on the hillside in the photos here). The Russian River example had a nicely spicy characteristic that's rare. But the estate pinot is the one I bought, two bottles even, because it balanced a warm, spicy dimension with delicious fruit flavor.

We finished up with a petite sirah. To me it wasn't very special; likely because I've had a lot of petite sirah before when I made regular wine tasting trips to Livermore Valley. I'm not saying it's bad, just that I'm a little jaded on the variety. Anthony was really into it and bought a bottle to take home.

As we stood to leave it was time to pay the piper. Many wineries advertise their bottle prices right on the tasting card, so you know what you're drinking. David Bruce didn't, which seemed a little suspicious. I was prepared for them to hit us with, like $55+ prices per bottle. I remember when I visited David Bruce 10 years ago the prices were all $35+, which was a lot back then. With inflation today those prices would be at least $55. So I was surprised that most of the bottles were priced at $39. That makes David Bruce... well, not a bargain, but definitely a solid quality-price ratio.

Oh, except the wine I liked best turned out to be the most expensive on the list. The estate pinot was $65. It's like they knew which was best, too. 😅 But by that point I'd already decided on it and didn't want to settle for second best. Plus, I figured with them comping the $30 tasting fee for buying two bottles it worked out to effectively $50 per bottle. I've groused before about $50 bottles of pinot noir.... Well, that was before the significant inflation of the past several years. And this one genuinely seemed worth it.

Keep reading: we visit Thomas Fogarty Winery next!

Italy Travelog #29
BCN Airport - Saturday, 31 May 2025, 1pm

We landed at Barcelona airport a few hours ago. It's where we're making a connection on our trip home from Sardinia today. The flight here was easy; just a boring 90 minutes in an airplane. The leg home to San Francisco from here is a lot longer. It'll be a whopping 13 hours.

We're on the ground for a few hours in Barcelona so we've taken a tour of the airport, from one end to the other. That's not just because we have time to kill or because we want to stretch our legs before being packing into cramped airline seats for another 13+ hours; it's because we have to. Our arrival gate was at one far end of the airport, while our departure gate is at pretty much the opposite end.



As we cruised around BCN airport we found that it has a few outdoors patios. It's nice to have an opportunity at an airport to get outside for sunshine and fresh air. So few airports (*other than tiny ones) have outdoors spaces once you're behind the security cordon.

Alas, while these patios at BCN offer sunshine they don't exactly offer fresh air. That's because they're smoking havens. And the smokers are fucking pigs. Despite there being ashtrays every 5 meters the floor is basically one big ashtray. You can barely set a foot anywhere without stepping on cigarette butts.

The purpose of our exploration wasn't just to find our next gate. It was also to get lunch. BCN has a lot of places to buy a meal in its big central concourse. That's especially true if your idea of a meal is, "I absolutely love ham and Swiss, please show me 17 variations on ham-and-Swiss sandwiches!" 😅 Alas, Hawk doesn't like ham, and I don't like Swiss. That knocked out, like, 80% of the restaurants.

We did find two restaurants that served food both of us could enjoy. One was an airport-typical world-fusion restaurant with options that seemed fashioned to middle American tastes. We decided that would be our fallback restaurant if we couldn't find anything actually interesting. Then we found a Spanish cafe in one of those outdoor patios that sold a variety of empanadas.



Hawk picked a pair of veggie empanadas (left in the photo above) while I picked three different types (right): one chicken, one beef, and one pulled pork. We also split a plate of fries not pictured above. Oh, and I enjoyed a mug of German beer that wasn't heinously expensive. At US airports such a beer would often cost $15 nowadays.

Instead of beer being heinously expensive, you know what is? Sodas.



In a convenience store near our gate I spotted these soda and beer prices. A bottle of Coke is €4.59; a can of beer is €3.99. And that's no crap beer. That's Estrella Reserva 1906, a beer I've bought several times at home and found to be one of the best overall beers I've found. Granted, the beer is a smaller serving than the soda, at 330ml vs. 500ml. Still, it's a flip of the norm in the US to see any single of beer selling cheaper than a single of soda.

Another thing that struck my US eyes as odd today was this:



So, ham, particularly jamón Ibérico, is a big thing in Spain. Lots of stores at the airport are selling it. But this one is bold enough to insist that it's the best in the airport.

Best in the airport? Sure, I could believe that. It's way more plausible than one of their competitors claiming to have the best ham in the world. I mean, I'm not sure where the best ham in the world is but I'm pretty darn sure it's not in an airport. 🤣

Italy Travelog #1
SFO Airport - Friday, 23 May 2025, 12:15pm

We've started our trip to Italy. We're approximately 0.5% of the way there! Yup, we're waiting in the United Club Lounge at SFO. And we've got a while to wait. It's just past noon now, and our flight doesn't depart until almost 5pm.

Why come so early? Well, we thought the lounge would be a decent place to relax, with a bit of free food and space to get some work done without worrying about whether there'd be rush hour traffic later in the day. Well, we definitely solved for the "avoid rush hour traffic" part of the equation, but the lounge isn't exactly relaxing. It's overcrowded. Like, people are hovering for chairs like people hovering for parking spaces at Costco on Saturday afternoon. And the food? What little there is gets picked apart almost as soon as a new dish is brought out.

Maybe the crowd in the lounge is a lunch time thing, with people packing in here hoping to skip the outrageously priced slop served in the fancy-looking restaurants out in the terminal. ...Speaking of which, Hawk and I spent $60 for lunch on a shitty knockoff of Panda Express. I threw my plate out slightly more than half eaten.

Not a great start to this trip. We'll see if it improves soon.

Wednesday this week was a busy day, work-wise. I was out and about on the Peninsula visiting a few customers. I met at one customer's offices just before 10am for a couple of meetings, took them out to lunch nearby, then drove up to Redwood City to meet another customer for a couple of meetings, then took them out to dinner. It turned out that both meals were at Greek restaurants!

Lunch in Santa Clara was at Opa!, a new-ish branch of a restaurant that's been around in Silicon Valley for a while. I don't remember if I've eaten at one of the their sister restaurants before. If I have, it's been years. Thus this counts for my Try New Restaurants New Year's resolution from 2023. 😂

Opa! feels like a high-concept chain restaurant. The decor is upscale and modern yet looks a bit too... pat... to be unique. It's not really a chain, though. There are only 3 of them. The menu is decently broad, spanning all the standards you'd expect to see at a mid-scale Greek restaurant, plus a few crossover dishes like the "Greek Philly Cheesesteak" that one of my colleagues ordered. It was huge, BTW, and he said it was great.

I ordered the Greek meatloaf, one of the house specialties. It was pretty good. I mean, how great can meatloaf be? It was moist, came covered— but not drenched— with a mild tomato sauce, and sat atop a serving of slightly too-creamy mashed potatoes and a few pieces of wilted spinach. The only reason I wouldn't order it again is because I'd like to try at least 3 or 4 other things on the menu before doubling back.

Also tasty looking was the grilled flank steak with feta cheese. That was my #2 choice, and one of my colleagues ordered it. He had no complaints about it, but my concern looking at his plate was that it was just a piece of meat with a small sprinkling of cheese. I guess if you're doing a carnivore diet that's perfect, but if you're looking for a square meal it's missing a few sides.

Speaking of sides, I also ordered a few appetizers to share. Saganaki was served alight, which thrilled all 5 of my colleagues, none of whom had ever seen it before. Opa! We also shared a plate of dolmas. They were disappointing. They were very fresh, but inside the freshly rolled grape leaves they were just rice.

Price-wise Opa! was on the spendy side of what Hawk and I usually do for meals out together. The tab for our group of six was about $240 all-in, so $40/head with tax and tip and non-alcoholic drinks. The qualify and presentation of the food seemed fair for the price, though, so I could see us going there together every once in a while.

Dinner in Palo Alto was at Evvia. Yes, it was Greek twice in one day. That happened because I picked the lunch spot while a colleague of mine picked dinner and apparently didn't notice the overlap. Or maybe he just really wanted Greek and was jealous because he couldn't attend lunch. 🤣

Evvia has been a well regarded restaurant in tony Palo Alto for a long time. I'm not a go-to-fancy-restaurants sort of person— except when the company's paying 🤣— so I'd never bothered to try it. But I was also curious to try it on OPM.

Evvia's dining room has a classy feel without being pretentious. We were seated outdoors on the covered patio where things felt a bit more casual. Heat lamps blazed away making it actually too hot despite cool evening air in the 50s.

The food at Evvia was all very good though not distinctive. Nothing made me say "Wow!" And the saganaki was not served alight. Disappointing. Maybe it's a fire code thing with the tented patio?

Surprisingly Evvia was not that spendy. I mean, it was more expensive than Opa!. And if you go deep in the extensive wine list you can add hundreds to your tab. But the braised lamb shank entrée I ordered was just $40. I didn't see the final bill (a sales VP paid) but I figure the average cost for a meal and shared appetizer and non-alcoholic drink would come to about $70pp all-in. Order heavy like the VP did, though, with lots of appetizers and two nice bottles of wine, and... well, I think the bill for 5 people topped a grand. 😳

I could see going back to Evvia with Hawk. It'd be in our splurge range though not a crazy splurge. As not-crazy-expensive as it is I wished I'd tried it on my own years ago.

I've written before about how I hate Las Vegas. Pretty much every time I've been to Vegas for work in the past several years, I've hated it. Why? Here are Five Things:

• The gambling sucks. Gambling was once the primary draw to Las Vegas. The house always had the edge, of course, but years ago they could be gentle about it. Now they've worsened the odds for players by 3x-10x. It amazes me that people still sit down for games where the house wins, on average, 2%, 5%, or even 7% of your money every turn.


• Food is stupid expensive. Years ago Vegas casinos offered good food at fantastic prices. It was a loss-leader to get you in to gamble. Now not only is the gambling itself more of a con than ever before, but the food has flipped around to being a profit center. A meal in a food court costs $30. Dinner in a nice restaurants starts at $100pp— and that's if all you order is an entree and a glass of water, after tax and tip. Throw in a few drinks because you're celebrating, and an appetizer and/or dessert, and you're looking easily at $200pp.


• Smoking. Even though the number of smokers as a percentage of casino patrons is smaller today than years ago, it's still sickening how much latent smoke is in the air. It's like it's all built up over the past 30 years. I have to shower before going to bed so as not to wake up sick in the morning.


• It takes forever to go anywhere. When I enjoyed gambling in Vegas years ago, part of my routine was to visit different casinos to explore the variety. It wasn't hard to get around. Now going anywhere takes seemingly forever. Call an Uber at peak hours? It takes 15-20 minutes to arrive, then 25 minutes to go a few miles. Okay, this is partly a consequence of the huge conferences I travel to Vegas for, and that's why I hate going to Vegas for conferences.


• Mega-hotels have gotten mind-numbingly boring. And too big. To me part of the allure of staying in a nice hotel is that it's nice. (Duh!) While the mega-casino hotels look nice on the outside, they quickly feel mind-numbingly boring on the inside. And they're too big, so it takes for-freaking-ever to get to/from your room.

Well, that's 5 reasons why I hate Vegas. But I said in the title I'm finding peace with it. How is that?

Part of it is just acceptance. Vegas is what it is. It's not like I'm doing it wrong or failing to master some "simple trick" that makes it better. The trick, if you can call it that, is not to go. Indeed, when I travel through Vegas for leisure, I stay in a non-casino hotel outside the casino areas and focus most of my time on things that are not in casinos.

And the other part of it is that when I have to stay in Vegas, in casinos, because my company wants me to work a show, I choose not to sweat the prices. Even off-Strip hotels are $200++/night because of the crowds? That's the company's decision to send me there. Expensive Uber/Lyft rides? Their decision, not mine. Stupid-expensive meals? Again, not my decisions, and not my money.