Lights, Casino, Action!

corey    Military, News    

So I’m in my hotel room (paying $10 a day for internet access – this internet has yet to go get me Starbucks or give me a massage so I have no idea why it’s so expensive), here on this balmy Sunday evening. Though by the time I finish typing it’ll probably be early early Monday morning.

Las Vegas, Nevada.

I’m here for two weeks for a military exercise called Red Flag. This is an exercise for our pilots so that they can practice tactics against aggressors. The aggressors are pilots who fly in that squadron (I forget which one) and it is their job to do these exercises which they do all year long for various different units. Apparently there are 4-5 other units here also participating in this Red Flag. Two of which are our good buddies: the New Mexico and the Montana Air National Guard. These are the guys that shared the stint in Iraq with us.

It looks like I’ll be on the late shift this week (swapping for the day shift next week) which means I’ll be working from 6pm to about 2am. Not terrible hours. Hopefully we’ll be able to head home early when the jets are down for the night, but our NCOs typically like to make us sit around for a couple hours. So we’ll see.

We’re staying in a hotel off the strip, in a not so great neighborhood so we won’t be doing any excursions on foot directly from here. We do have rental cars, so the plan is to make use of those to go see the sights on the Strip at somepoint along the line. The hotel we are in is also a casino (go figure), which is ok in that we don’t have to go anywhere when we are bored and want to blow 20-40 bucks. But it really really sucks because people are constantly smoking in the casino proper and your clothes smell like it. Even just passing through to get to the elevators to the rooms is enough to give me a headache.

Bestest new betting game: craps. I really like playing Blackjack but I seem to be in a slump. If I can’t get the dealer to bust with hands that *should* bust 6 times in a row I get annoyed and go somewhere else. After watching some of the other guys play craps for 30 minutes I was able to step in and have a lot of fun. After 3 hours, playing on just $20, I had won somewhere around $55. It really is a fun game but there is tons of stuff going on and tons of different kinds of bets and placing odds on bets and yadda yadda yadda. I’m just barely scratching the surface but at least that part is pretty fun.

Much like playing Texas Hold’em, it’s nice to be able to play for awhile on a small amount of money as opposed to Blackjack which (in my mind) requires at least 80-100 to play and you could easily lose all of that in 10-15 mins.

I hope to make it out to Treasure Island and Caesar’s Palace this coming weekend, so I’ll try to post an update on Monday and let you all know how it went. Have fun!

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