2014-04-20 This is a story about the best omelet that J has ever had. We've been watching a lot of How I Met Your Mother so it is a little long. I'm not sorry. This still isn't the most self-indulgent thing you'll see on here today. Around the time J and I decided to move in together, we got in a discussion about the Grand Canyon. I said it was a big ditch. J said that I wouldn't say that if I'd seen it. So we decided to go find out around her birthday. Eleven years ago, on April 18, 2003, we took my car and headed for the Grand Canyon. We left our freshly-rented townhouse in San Jose and headed north so that we could take 580 through Altamont and drive past the windmills. We saw some of the egg-beater windmills they had there that have since been removed, adding an hour onto our already long drive. I had never been on I-5 before. We drove through Kern county, past all the barber pole-striped water towers. J had decreed, and I had agreed, that we would eat at as many non-chain places as we could. That's how we came to eat at a place called Bagdad Cafe. It was a diner, somewhere along I-15, in a stand of diners that couldn't be called anything other than uneventful. Well, I suppose it could be called mediocre, but I did learn that there was a movie called Bagdad Cafe that spelled Baghdad that way. On we drove. By the time we got to the Hoover Dam, it was was dark. Hoover Dam in the dark is a bridge and parking lot. A big parking lot, but it's kind of hard to get the scope of it in the dark. I remember a security stop. I suppose they asked if we'd packed our own car. We had a hotel booked next to the canyon at the standard tourist spot on the south rim. To get there, we had to drive halfway past the canyon and turn north. Somewhere on that road it started snowing. I never really learned to drive in the snow and that was a little unnerving, especially at the end of a day's drive. I was very glad to get to the hotel. J booked a great hotel. She'd stayed there on her previous trip. If you ever go, I'd recommend it. Quality Inn there has a four-story indoor atrium with a nice pool and hot tub. We booked last minute and they got us in. We asked for two nights, and they got us a weird booking with one night in a handicapped-accessible room (with a door to the parking lot, as well as the atrium) and one night in a smoking room. We got there just a little too late for the hot tub, which closed at 10. J used it anyway but they had turned the bubbles off. Oh, well. We went to bed, exhausted. In the morning, we got up for the morning ritual, followed by all the tourist stuff we could squeeze in that day. (Not enough time.) Over breakfast, I started advocating a new travel strategy. "Let's leave a little early," I said, "and we'll drive to Vegas and stay there." My motivations were two: first, I wanted to split up that long drive. Second, I wanted to shoot craps. I had a great craps experience in 2001 in Reno with a bunch of friends at a bachelor party and I figured any craps was good craps. Anyone who knows the area will realize both premises are flawed. I was trying to get a 70-30 split to the drive but it was more like 90-40. Worse, I wasn't going to have much time to gamble. (This was before I really got into poker.) A third flaw is that J doesn't care for Vegas. She doesn't gamble. But there was also the final, key flaw, which is that we'd need a hotel. Since we were at a Quality Inn and it was very nice, we called the reservations number on the hotel stationary and asked for a Quality Inn in Las Vegas with a hot tub. I should have known better. I had been to Vegas only once before and didn't know anything about the city. But I knew Quality Inns can be quite variable--I used to live 70 yards from one. I delivered the Sunday paper there. On cold days while waiting for the school bus, we'd huddle around their dryer vent. That one was just a simple motel. So I should have realized that I needed to do better--but I didn't. "Quality Inn Key Largo Hotel and Casino," said the voice on the phone. On Flamingo. "OK," I said. Being 2003 I think I had a road atlas in the car and that was good enough. So we went off to view the canyon. We walked up and I said, "It's a big ditch." I was laughing. J didn't find that funny. We checked out the tourist stuff, looked at the canyon from a couple different places and briefly considered walking down. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to get back up. So we went to the gift shop. J bought a jacket. I bought a jigsaw puzzle since we had been doing them at work in the breakroom next to the fridge with the soda. Par was about three days for completion. That puzzle I bought took about 90 minutes. Around 4 PM we concluded we were done. We headed out, and we got to Vegas around 9:30 PM or so, maybe later. When we got to the hotel in Vegas, it was obvious I had booked poorly. The casino was especially smoky. Very small, mostly slots, with a few blackjack tables and even fewer open blackjack tables. Roulette table wasn't open. No poker. No craps. The biggest draw for that property was that every hour was Happy Hour. No one was happy. J was very tired, and we asked about room service. No room service but they did have a coffee shop. I said I'd go fetch, so we went to the room. The room, at least, was okay. We were spending like $60 on the room. For our money, we got a bar area with a fridge. It looked novel, if also frat-house pathetic. I went down to the coffee shop and ordered a couple sandwiches. I waited forever for them. In the days before smartphones, this was just downtime. J got a steak sandwich, which they burned. I took it back down to the coffee shop and asked them to do it again. They scaped the burn off for her and gave it back. She ate three bites and said she wasn't hungry. J dismissed me so I could go shoot dice. I went to Terrible's, because that sounded like a great place. It was not as bad as the name would suggest, but I think I like their gas stations better. I lost $85 in an hour, took a souvenir chip, and went back to the hotel. J was asleep so I decided to make likewise. Right after I got comfortable, I heard a noise that was exactly like the noise an Raid Bug Spray commercial uses to represent a roach. I turned the light on and saw that very roach hanging out on the bar. I killed it, naturally. Now my dilemma was this: I was nine hours from my house. My wife was exhausted and asleep in a room in a sleazy hotel on a pat of the trip that I engineered. I could have cut out of the hotel, but at midnight on a Saturday I wasn't sure that I could do better, and if we left, I was quite sure that we were going to be exhausted, and therefore miserable, on the drive home. And somehow J had slept through this. So I let her sleep. In the morning we got up and I told her what had happened. She confirmed that it was probably the right decision to let her sleep. It was pretty easy to get out of the hotel early. We checked out at the front desk and I told them about the roach. "You should have told us! We could have come and sprayed!" Right. They took $10 off the cost of the room. At this point, I wanted to salvage what I could, which meant breakfast. Knowing little about Vegas, and staying at a hotel on Flamingo, I just drove to the Bellagio, left the car with the valet, and went straight for the buffet. There was no line and we got a seat immediately. I don't remember what I had, but J got an omelet from the omelet station. The guy made it right in front of her, and made it just right. She still says it was the best one she has ever had. We headed back out for the car and walked past a mammoth line that had appeared while we were eating. Everyone in line was decked out in their Easter Sunday best. Through sheer dumb luck, we'd hit the Bellagio buffet on Easter Sunday in the instant before all the locals did the same. I wasn't paying much attention to Easter, because I was more focused on it being J's birthday. After that, it was a long drive home -- the Vegas detour was not worth it -- but I did play a Shaq Attack pinball at a burger joint somewhere in the Central Valley. That also was not worth it. The Quality Inn Key Largo Hotel and Casino has been demolished. Good riddance. So, what I really wanted to say is, Happy Birthday, J!