Flying on a holiday is always a bit of a gamble, but it was a risk Grumpy was prepared to take as we headed to Vegas for Thanksgiving. While I was hoping to recreate “Viva Las Vegas,” what we actually got was more like “Trains, Planes and Automobiles.”
We booked our trip shortly after arriving home from England in September. The bug we picked up while gone — thankfully not COVID-19 — had us itching for more travel.
After all the hoops we had gone through to fly internationally, surely a short hop across a couple of states would be fine. Grumpy selected a direct flight that would get us there in time for a late lunch on Thanksgiving Day. We’ve been to Vegas multiple times, including our honeymoon almost 41 years ago, and it’s always a thrill. November is a great time because the weather is just perfect.
We’d just finished packing when we got the dreaded notification on our phones: ‘Your American Airlines flight has been canceled.’ Grumpy rushed to rebook. Of course, by now there were no direct flights, so we ended up with a connection at Phoenix.
“It’ll be fine,” he assured me. “We’ll be arriving in Vegas only an hour or so later than we expected.”
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The first flight was scheduled to leave on time, so we boarded happily and prepared to take off.
“Shouldn’t we be leaving by now?” I said across the aisle to Grumpy. “We’re all on board. What’s going on?”
Ten minutes later I got my answer. There was an issue with something in the hold, meaning some luggage had to be moved. Another hour passed. Knowing the only food we were ever likely to get would be a small bag of pretzels didn’t help our rumbling stomachs.
Finally, all was well and we were off … off to try and get to the connecting flight in time. There were no other flights available so if we missed that one it would mean Thanksgiving at the Phoenix airport.
I admit I had a lot to be thankful for this Thanksgiving, but number one has to be that the gate to our next plane was close to where we’d just landed. We made our connection with 30 minutes to spare. No time to get anything to eat, of course, but who needs a miniature $10 airport sandwich when you have a huge turkey dinner to eat later?
I suspected something was wrong when I saw not one, but two maintenance men pass by my seat from the rear. A couple of rows in front of me, one of the seats wouldn’t stay in position. After 45 minutes, the passenger assigned to said seat finally agreed to sit on it and thankfully the steward didn’t need duct tape to make him do it.
By the time we got to Vegas we were starving. By now it was past 5 p.m., but still time to find a Thanksgiving feast somewhere. After all, the car rental place was just a stone’s throw from the Strip.
Back in the old days, Vegas consisted of two areas, the seedy yet loveable downtown and the glitzy, sophisticated Strip. Today those main arteries have so many roads leading off, around and behind that it feels like the whole place has had a bypass. By now the clock was ticking.
I remembered a conversation I’d had with Grumpy just a few short weeks before, when we were deciding which shows to see now everything is open again.
“Let’s not pick one on the day we arrive, just in case,” I said.
“But it doesn’t start until 7 p.m. we’ll have loads of time,” he insisted.
At 6.15 p.m. we were still driving around the parking deck at the Flamingo, trying to find a spot. Eventually we found one and rushed into the hotel.
“We’ve just got time for a snack,” said Grumpy. “We’ll have a quick bite now and enjoy a proper meal after.”
And so it was our memorable Thanksgiving feast turned out to be a shared bag of fries and a chocolate shake. We gobbled it down faster than any turkey could have and made it into the theater just in time. By now I wasn’t really in the mood for a show since we’d been traveling all day and hadn’t even seen our hotel yet, but we needed a little magic and received it from magician Piff the Magic Dragon of “America’s Got Talent” fame.
We left the theater at 9 p.m. and exhausted began our trek back to the car.
“I knew this wasn’t going to be easy, so I made sure I remembered exactly where I parked,” said Grumpy as I began to wilt. “We just get out at the fourth floor, turn right and walk up the ramp.”
The funny thing about ramps is they can go up and down in all kinds of directions. After 15 minutes, Grumpy started to press the key fob, which teasingly told us where our car was — above. But short of using a grappling rope and James Bonding it up a wall, we simply couldn’t work out how to get there.
Disheveled and distraught, we made it to the hotel registration desk at 10 p.m. By then the room we’d booked weeks ago seemed to have vanished along with our dinner. This might have been because Grumpy insisted on marching us through two miles of hotel corridors away from the Palazzo, where we were meant to be staying, to the Venetian next door.
We couldn’t unpack because we were given a room for that night only, with the promise that we could move back to the Palazzo in the morning.
“Well, there goes our Thanksgiving,” I complained to Grumpy. “I told you we shouldn’t travel on a holiday.”
“It’s not too late to save the day!” he declared, sitting down at the desk to call for room service.
Before I could say “I bet it is” I turned round to see him fall backwards on the revolving chair nearly hitting his head on the floor.
Ever determined, he waited on the phone for room service to pick up. By now it was past 11 p.m. When someone did, the first thing they said was any food order would take a minimum of 75 minutes, probably because in a hotel that size you had to take a flight to get from the kitchens to the rooms.
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“That’s it, I’m done!” I snapped. “Whatever you do, I wouldn’t do any late-night gambling if I were you. We’re definitely out of luck.”
Hilary Decent is a British freelance journalist who moved from England to Naperville in 2007.