We're Home! Did You Miss Us?

I've decided to pretend that 30 posts in 30 days in November is the same thing as my post-a-day commitment. In order for that charade to stay airborne, I'll need all of you to clap your hands, sprinkle yourselves with fairy dust and say, "I believe!"

So anyway...we're back from NeverNeverLand (which can be distinguished from NeverLand Ranch by the lack of zoo animals and seductive 7 year old boys) and we had a fantabulous time. The food was good, the companionship was fantastic, and the sex was mortifyingly loud. We actually spent Saturday slinking up and down the hotel corridor, in case we accidentally bumped into our next-room-over neighbors, who probably hate us.

On the bright side, though...we had fun. And we don't get enough vacations to feel too guilty yet. After all, if they didn't want to hear loud middle-aged lesbian sex, they should have stayed in a different hotel. It was clearly poor planning on their part.

We stayed at the Harrah's St. Louis, distinguished by it's comfy king-sized beds, Tiffany rotunda, and freeness. As in, pay-nothing-ness. We got a three free night offer, and we took it. In exchange for the freeness, we probably gave them back the cost of the free room by dinking away at the penny slots in the evenings. However, since we're low-rollers, we can get 6 hours of amusement and a couple of exciting jangly $10 jackpots out of $100 and not hate ourselves later.

Here's the two fascinatingly appalling stories that Lori threatened you with:

Saturday night we were sitting in the penny slot section, playing the Gem Drop game for 20 cents a spin. I think we'd been playing the same $20 for about 2 hours...up $10, down $12, up $15, down $20...that sort of thing. Behind us was a bank of games we refer to as "That Damn Lion Game", which is a 100 line penny game, 2 lines per penny, that tantalizes you with flashes of greatness, but never actually produces any....at least not in our case.

As we were dinking away at our machine, the man behind us shouted, threw his hands up, and danced back from the Damn Lion Game. He had hit the jackpot, the REAL jackpot...all 100 lines, every single square in every possible combination had lined up with lions or wilds. He won $1700 on a single spin of a penny machine.

So he hooted and hollered and kissed his wife and danced around...all that stuff that people do when they've won a ton of money. The casino people came over and hand-paid him his money and took his picture, and the guy next to me nudged me and said, "He's gonna get some good lovin' tonight."

Except that our Big Winner was drunk off his ass, and the minute they paid him for his huge win, he turned around to the machine behind him and dropped in a $100 bill and then lost it in about three minutes. Then he dropped in another one...and lost it in about two minutes. We watched him, in the space of about 15 minutes, lose at least $600 of his big win. Me and the neighbor guy exchanged glances a few times, and decided that his window for the Good Lovin' was closing fast. If he didn't knock that shit off soon, instead of the Good Lovin' he was gonna be getting the Bad Ass Chewin'.

We left while he was still staggering around slinging his big jackpot around like a guy who wins $1700 on penny slots all the time. We decided that the next day, when he sobered up and iced down all the places the wife had beaten him with the baseball bat, he was going to be a very depressed man.

The other story, a cautionary tale for those of you who cling to the fantasy that our children will take good care of us in our dotage:

We wandered through the casino on Saturday afternoon, and saw a middle aged couple playing the slots side-by-side, with an ancient old woman in a wheelchair behind them. She looked like a contemporary of King Tut, shrivelled and wizened like an old apple, and held in an approximately upright position with a series of straps. She had her chin on her chest and a bib tied around her neck to catch the drool leaking from her toothless mouth. She was completely oblivious to her surroundings, and quite possibly dead.

In the meantime, her children were enjoying Mom's Day Out of the Home by gambling feverishly. Family bonding, it seems, looks all kinds of ways for all kinds of families.

Anyway, other than those starkly unattractive displays of the more unseemly side of the human spirit, we had a good time. We ate the free buffets, enjoyed the free room, cursed the non-free WiFi (and c'mon...who knew there still places in the world that don't have free WiFi?) and toured and shopped St. Louis.

Now we're waiting for the coupon for three free days in New Orleans to mature in January. Watch for us, we'll be coming to a free hotel near you.