My wife and I have this thing we do every ten years or so where we get bored with wherever we are living and decide to pack up and move. This is how we ended up in Los Angeles. It’s also how we ended up in North Carolina. Well, apparently it was time for another new adventure. About a month ago we got the itch again. Over a few beers and some nachos we decided to move to Las Vegas. Once we decide to do something, we typically do not waste much time. so we began preparing our house for sale, getting rid of stuff we did not need and started planning for a move west.
We essentially got rid of everything we own. A few things are stored away in a storage locker back in North Carolina, but everything we brought with us to Las Vegas fit in my Jeep Wrangler. A couple of suitcases full of clothes, my desk and DXRacer chair, computers and some personal documents. My wife’s car was reserved for the dogs. We were a bit worried how they would do driving across the country. Two of the three (and one in particular) do not travel well. I’m happy to report that they did awesome! Spot (the beagle) threw up within the first hour, but then was fine the whole rest of the trip!
I’ve done the drive to Las Vegas (and back) before. I actually really enjoy long road trips, especially by myself. But with three dogs it was obviously a bit more of a challenge. And when you have three dogs it is particularly challenging because most hotels that allow dogs allow up to 2 of them. Luckily Spot is small enough to hide under a blanket. All in all the trip went quite well. We hit virtually no traffic, had no car trouble and managed to miss rush hour in every major city we passed through. We did hit some weather in Oklahoma, including tornadoes all around us, but even that did not really slow us down much.
The last night of the trip we stopped for the night in a small town just west of Flagstaff Arizona. While there we visited a brewery called Grand Canyon Brewing Company. The tasting room was really nice and the beer hit the spot after what had been about 30 hours of driving up to that point. We also had some of the best Thai food we had tasted in a long time! We only had about three hours of driving to do the last day, and we did not have to meet our rental agent until about 2 PM, so the last day of the trip was a pretty easy one, winding up through the desert, by Lake Mead and the hoover damn and down in to Henderson where we would be renting.
I had forgotten just how much I love the landscape of the desert, and of the west coast in general. i heard Carlos Welch talking about this recently on the Thinking Poker Podcast, and I could not agree more. I’ve seen plenty of trees in my life. Give me mountains and sand all day!
We have now been in Las Vegas for three days and are settling in nicely. I got myself registered for the “new” WSOP poker site. I’ve played on WSOP.com in the past, but apparently you have to re-register now that they have merged player pools with Deleware and New Jersey. I’ve already played a couple of tournaments on the site and so far the fields seem quite soft. Hopefully the guarantees continue to grow!
We had to do a bunch of shopping. Not only for food, but for general “life supplies”. We threw away, gave away or sold everything, so we didn’t even have things like dish soap, toilet paper and so on. Some of that was provided in the rental house, but not all of it.
We have also checked out a few local breweries. Nothing mind blowing as of yet, but Bad Beat Brewing was pretty solid.
We also went down and checked out Freemont Street. I’ve been there several times, but my wife has probably not been there in over a decade, so it was fun to roam around, enjoy a few cold drinks and do some light gambling. They run a free concert series down there each summer and there are several bands playing that I look forward to checking out including Candlebox and The Cult!
The house we are staying in is quite a bit smaller than our old house (which is exactly what we were looking for). But we have managed to make it work. My wife and I both work at home, but she works much earlier than me, so we agreed she should take the office. I set my fear up in the guest bedroom, where I will be playing poker, streaming and podcast recording from. The house is pretty far out in Henderson. I think we will look closer to the strip (but still in Henderson) unless we find some other area that interests us.
The World Series of Poker is almost here and I’m looking forward to experiencing it for the first time as a resident of Nevada! If you are in town, reach out. We can grab a beer and tell bad beat stories.
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