What happens in Vegas

Fabulous?

As the stunningly patient and mighty fine SML and I prepare to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary at the end of next month, we've heard the siren call of nostalgia and it's led us to a dusty box of bulky VHS video tapes. Those tapes documented  the highlights of the early years of our marriage and what we did with Our Lady of Awesome, CAL, and The Boy. One of the videos we watched captured a family trip that included a stopover in Las Vegas.

That's right a family trip to Las Vegas. In the mid 90's, Las Vegas was being buffeted by a really bad economy and some marketing genius decided that the way to capture back tourists was to promote Las Vegas as a family-friendly destination. Suffice to say, it was a failure with a capital "F." The castles of the Excalibur were a low-rent substitute for the castle owned by a Mouse (I dare not mention them by name for fear of severe repercussions). The New York New York was not even a good fake of the real thing and the rides at Sewer Sewer Circus Circus were straight out of a bankrupt traveling carnival (for fun, ask CAL about riding one of the rides there ~ she's emotionally scarred to this day). Still, that didn't stop us from stopping in the city for a couple of nights on our way to Zion's National Park.

On the second morning of our stay, the mighty fine SML and our friend that was traveling with us had gotten up very early to go to the LDS Temple in Las Vegas. Since the kids were all under seven, we couldn't leave them alone (well, it was Vegas, so we probably could have...), I stayed in bed. We had two connecting rooms and the girls were in the other room and I had the Boy with me. I heard the door to our room swing open, but I hadn't heard the key clunk like you do in hotels, which seemed odd. Being blind as a bat without my contacts in or glasses on and from the bed, I couldn't see the door anyway, I thought the mighty fine SML had come back for something. Turns out not so much. There was the sound of someone scraping against the wall, which seemed odd, so I put on my glasses as the room filled with the smell of, well, a rough night in one too many bars. Suffice to say, it was not my wife. It was some guy. Some drunk guy. He continued his path into the room and saw my clothes from the day before slung over a chair. He got to the chair and started to pull off his shirt. At this point, I jumped from the bed and said, 'Dude, you're in the wrong room.' This phased him not a whit. He then picked up my pants and it was at this point, I took him by the shoulders and said again, 'Dude,seriously, you are in the wrong room!' The girls were up at this point, and staring wide-eyed in disbelief from the adjacent room. Still holding our new drunken friend by the shoulders, I led him out of the room and into the hallway, where he continued bouncing from wall to wall, like a blip in a Pong game, towards the other side of the hotel.

As I closed the door, I made sure it was locked, calmed down my freaked out daughters, and rang the hotel's crack security team. Given all the other shenanigans that they deal with, I'm quite certain my tale of a drunk coming into our room and trying to put on my pants was, well, mild. They were non-plussed by my story. It didn't take long to surmise what happened. He was looking for his room, and not knowing what room, let alone what floor he was on, he was just bouncing into doors, seeing which one would open. We figure that when the mighty fine SML and our friend had left that morning, they thought they had pulled the heavy door shut, but hadn't, hence the surprise visit. No harm, no foul, right?

Moral of the story - always make sure your hotel room is really closed and don't leave your clothes out for the random drunk to try on. All you need is for said drunk to get upset when he realizes you don't have anything in his size.