Just got back from Vegas. Yep, I spent 3.5 days in a nice hotel room with two kids 2 yr and younger. Vegas, Baby!
We were there on a work trip, actually, but babysitting arrangements fell through at the last minute, leaving me with diaper duty. Seeing as I’m their Daddy, and they are pretty dang cute, and I don’t get all that excited by Interbike in the first place, this really wasn’t that bad of a deal for me. Heck, there are lots of Dads out there wishing they had their kids while their wife did the work gig for a few days. That’s what we did.
Since they are little ones, we weren’t about to order them room service type fare. Since we were on The Strip without a car, we had to walk anywhere we wanted to go. Pushing a double stroller along The Strip is bad, no matter what time you try to go to Walgreens for groceries. And shopping for groceries at a drug store is silly in the first place. But when one is in the wilderness, one has to rely on one’s wits to survive.
Needless to say, room 4-120 at the Venetian probably won’t ever be the same again. I recommend it if you like cheese and cheerios and milk and lunchmeat and whatever else didn’t make it to digestion nicely ground into your floors. All of the outlets are 100% accessible to kids, so you can let them rearrange lamps, phones, clocks, etc. There is one children’s channel on tv there, so you are sure to be able to read or think quietly for 2-3 minutes each day.
The bathroom is tile from floor to ceiling, so the acoustics are great for high pitched squeals. Believe it or not, the bathtub is situated just so that a nimble 2 yr old can climb on the tub and then transition to the counter and sink. Your 2yr old may or may not eat makeup, but some do.
Your kids may or may not get a kick out of flushing one cheerio at a time. When you have time to kill, the cheerio flushing game may not be good for the water supply in the desert, but it will give you something to do on hour number 4 of a 12 hr day in the hotel. Remember, loading two kids into a double stroller, maneuvering through a heavy door and into and out of an elevator, through a hotel and casino AND THEN to The Strip isn’t as easy as it looks when you see smiling kids in a stroller in a catalog.
The wife would come back after a hard day (really) at the show, but she’d bring back an autograph from Eddy or Floyd and tales of jackhole company reps and friendlies. All the while I’m glad to miss out on the obnoxious music blaring from “The BMX Zone” and having to talk with people who think their new model of carbon fiber valve caps are the thing that will help everyday racers win The Tour, because, you know, “Flamiano Bowlachilli used them in The Giro this year to help him to his 37th place on Stage Eleventeen.”
But dang if my wife didn’t get pushed by a water bottle salesman who gave her such a good pitch that she thought buying waterbottles right then was a good idea. That guy must be a genius or something. I mean, we have a hundred waterbottles at the house already.
But she made up for it by getting me a cool DVD thing from Phil Ligget personally.
Now I have to drink some coffee, because I have to write some Interbike reports of all the cool and hot stuff that was there, even if none of it got me inspired to say, “Neat!”
Oh, the longest autograph lines of the week…Tyler Hamilton at the Celltrans booth.
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