A Wonderful Weekend

We took our "vacation" this weekend to downtown Las Vegas (a whole ten miles or so from our house) and had a wonderful time!

Thanks to hubby's online poker playing (it's free to play at www.goldennuggetpoker.com) he won us a three day, two night stay at the Golden Nugget hotel in downtown Las Vegas, $100 for meals at the restaurants there, $50 in gaming chips, and two tickets to the Gordie Brown show at the same hotel.  Here's how we made a free-ish stay even more frugal:

• The hotel room was wonderful however we brought our own bottled water and hubby brought instant coffee because buying these items in the room costs $7 for the water and $10 for the coffee!  Yikes.  We also brought our own snacks to eat in the room.
• We ate at the medium-priced restaurants instead of the expensive steak house and split each meal.  These places serve troughs of food and it is a waste to order two meals because we don't eat that much and there is no fridge in the room so we would have had to throw away the leftovers.  This way we didn't waste food and the $100 easily lasted for all three days.  We did tip though so our only expense for this trip was around $25.
• The $50 in gaming chips was a fun way to play for free.  My $25 went in two hands of pai gow poker and hubby's lasted for three hands.  Other than that I don't gamble at all and hubby plays poker-- fortunately he came out a little ahead this trip!
• The Gordie Brown show was wonderful (we had seen it before and it was just as good the second time around) but we never order drinks when we go to shows, mostly because we usually just come from dinner and also because neither of us drink so paying $10 for a soda is a waste of money.
• We got to enjoy lots of free entertainment--we hung out by the pool for a while, walked around the Life is Beautiful Festival venue before they closed it off, watched the light show and live bands on Fremont, I read a couple of books I downloaded to my Kindle from our local library while hubby played poker, and there was plenty of people watching as the Red Dress Run was taking place at our hotel (there were A LOT of guys in red dresses!) as well as many people in costume for the Life is Beautiful Festival.

Overall, a wonderful "vacation" and even better, it was practically free!