This past weekend we had our annual fall gathering in Las Vegas. There are always a lot of schedules to coorindate. Bobby, Eddie and I had been trying to schedule a guys golf trip all year. Bobby happened to be coming to California for work, so we tried to schedule around that. Fearing that we might not be able to do golf and Vegas, we decided to combine them into one trip. I told Grace I preferred adults only.
When we were leaving Michigan back in August, I told Jen I’d see her in a few weeks. Olivia picked up on this and said, “wait, what?” I said we had an “adults only meeting.” Lucas ironically has been saying he wanted to go to Las Vegas for a while (it had been almost 2 years afterall). When Grace finally told Olivia our “meeting” was in Las Vegas, she was upset.
Even after booking our flights, I sensed a lot of disappointment from all interested parties that the kids were not coming (including Aunt Jen). I caved and we changed all of the travel arrangements to accomodate them.
This happened to be a huge fight weekend and room rates reflected this at our usual Encore/Wynn. We decided to try the SLS, which just opened a few weeks ago. After the opening, however, Jen found terrible reviews online so we made a game-time call to switch back to the Encore anyway. It was the right decision.
The team this year included Ray, who was part of our original Vegas crew back in the early 2000s. He hadn’t been with us since 2003 and it was awesome to have him join us. Next time he’ll have to bring the whole family.
On Friday, we just hung out by the pool in the afternoon. The kids can play in the water forever. We had dinner at Society, which is casual and in the hotel. Grace has been raving about some ribeye she had there for years. I don’t know how it could have lived up to the hype, but she was pleased with it again.
On Saturday, Bobby, Eddie and I met at 6am to play golf at Paiute. It was our first time playing there. They have three courses and we played Wolf, which is the signature course. It was very challenging and beautiful. A member joined us, which was helpful for some local knowledge.
The rest of the gang hung out at an Encore cabana for the day and we joined them in the afternoon. Saturday night, all nine of us piled into the rental truck to head over to our usual Mon Ami Gabi. For the first time, we sat virtually outside with a great view of the Bellagio fountain show. Lucas was very excited.
On Sunday, the boys golfed at our usual Bear’s Best. It was another beautiful (but hot) day. Grace got a cabana on the Wynn side and everyone unanimously agreed the pool and the cabanas are much better over there. There’s a canal that connects two large pools, which was the perfect depth and width for the kids to play. Sunday evening we celebrated Eddie’s birthday early at Carnevino.
For the first time, everyone flew out on Monday morning, which gave us a full weekend together. It was a little brutal to get up at 4am, but we were doing our best to get the kids to school and adults to work. Everyone got a little more rest on our short flight home.
It was another great trip that is all too familiar from the hotel, restaurants, golf courses, dealers and pit bosses. That said, it never gets old. In the end, I’m glad the kids joined us because we all had a great time with them and they wore out Uncle Ray and Uncle Bobby. They better not get too used to the cabana lifestyle.
