a night at foxwoods

Posted on June 23, 2009 by t. sterling — Leave a comment

In retrospect, I don’t think my adventures at Foxwoods Casino would be as long as a read as my adventures in New York, and technically, this POST should have been posted the day after the NY trip, and not a month later… but here we go.

We arrived around 5 pm to check in. I was told that due to my checking in with a bank card, the money would be taken out of my account immediately. Which was fine by me, I had just got paid. Yes, yes yall! Anyway, I had also received my AAA discount ’cause that’s how I roll, son. I’m sorry, I don’t know where this is coming from.

So first let me back up to arriving at the casino. There are three entrances. We wanted the main entrance so we could self-park in their underground garage. Silly me, giving directions, I told Kitten the wrong way and we almost got valet parking (which I later found out is a free service… I think). Anyway, we had to drive completely out onto the main road in order to get back in. I personally think that’s kinda crazy… but I’m not running the casino, so I have no say in the matter.

We take the elevator up to the hotel lobby. I’ll also chime in here to say that Foxwoods has four hotels. The elevator from the garage lifted us to the lobby of a hotel we weren’t staying in, which meant we had to go back to the elevator, rise to the casino level, then trek across to another elevator area, and go down to the other lobby of our hotel. Fortunately, our room was literally right next to the elevator. And when we wanted to go to the casino, it brought us right on the floor. They got points from me for that.

One main reason we were there was for the Hard Rock Cafe. If you’ve never eaten there, they have some very great food and lots of things all over their walls to keep you busy while you wait for your food. However, the place isn’t very cheap. This is also why we planned to go after payday. Unfortunately, a wedding party possibly had the same plan too. Or at least we assume it was a wedding party. My guesstimating puts this rowdy bunch of folk at about 40 or 50 people. Drunk people. Loud drunk people. At the Hard Rock, they play good rock n roll in the background while you eat. We couldn’t hear any of it. It was pretty bad. Our waitress apologized profusely. Due to limited talking (since we couldn’t hear each other) we were done with our food sooner than usual. We were also a little frightened of the other patrons.

Now this wasn’t our first time to Foxwoods, but we thought we should go in style. Unfortunately (again) no pictures were taken of us, so you can’t see how sexy-cool we were. But we were also “poor” as we like to say.

And how do poor people roll at the casino? With rolls of coins! That’s how. A few days before we left, we counted and rolled quarters, nickels, dimes, and finally, pennies. We took these with us and had an adventure finding a cashier who would exchange them for bills, since these slots no longer allow the use of coins. Bummer. The lady looked a little perplexed that we both showed up with $16 in rolls of coins. We both had $36 each, but left our rolls of quarters for later use (we never used them). Besides that, the machines didn’t taken $1 bills, yet had $1 games. Go figure. We found the 5 cent and 1 cent games and tried our luck. For once, I won something. $50! However, Kitten would contend we won $20 since it took our $30 to do it. But the ticket the machine printed out said $50, and that’s what I’m saying I won.

After a glorious victory, we went back to our room again to give our feet a rest. We admitted that we were still in pain from the day before in the city. We both decided to change our shoes, so we looked a tad bit more casual than the formal sexy-cool we were earlier. I mean, we were still sexy-cool, don’t get it twisted! This time in our outing, we just went to explore the rest of the resort and check out the newest addition: the MGM Grand.

It was a long walk to get there. But it was certainly nice. We cashed in our ticket and got our $50. We wandered around and found an Apple store, a bunch of cool but expensive restaurants, and overall, the place made me think of Ocean’s Thirteen. Who am I kidding, the entire time I was there I was thinking of the Ocean’s movies. I brought Eleven but our room lacked a DVD player. Kitten had never seen the movie, so what a perfect time to show it, right? On our journey back to the other side of the resort, we ran into some promoters who gave us tickets to a free show. The tickets weren’t really for the show at the Hard Rock, but to get free drinks.

We go back to our room and hang out until the show begins. We actually got distracted reading the room service menu and how ridiculous the prices sounded. But we arrived to a moderately full house and got a table close to the stage. We ordered the same drinks we had earlier that night as we discover the band called “Sugar” is actually a cover band that has about 8 members to it. About 4 of them sing, 2 of the guys play instruments and sing a few leads, and 2 girls were the main singers (even for guy songs they covered) as well as dancers. Dancers that didn’t have a lot of variety to their dances. But whatever, it’s a free show.

We observed lots of interesting people. A group of friends came in, one of which was very drunk and a bit of a jerk. He threw up on the table and his girlfriend walked him out. She came back pissed off and appeared to get the other friends to leave with them. Eventually the dude came back, left, came back, and left again. It was weird. The friends never left and partied at the stage. Two old dudes that looked like a mix of unpopular retired rockers and Siegfried and Roy roamed the restaurant. What we didn’t know was that they were on the prowl. Siegfried asked this one older lady to dance by offering his hand. She declined, and he went back over to his friend after that song ended.

I have to admit, the band was pretty good. Laughable, but good. We enjoyed joking about them and their dancing, or their singing because it couldn’t quite compare to their originals. However we appreciated their range in song choices. We knew a vast majority, but they lost us on the occasional few.

Being at the Hard Rock Cafe during this time was the highlight of my night. Maybe even possibly that week. We danced for half a song to a song we couldn’t really dance to, but we had lots of fun.

We retired to our room after the show ended around 1 am. We awoke around 8 or 9 am, washed and packed, and headed to our favorite hot spot: Dunkin Donuts. We were a little surprised to see the price of coffee costing almost an extra dollar more! Criminals! Soon after, we checked out, and returned home.

I had been a little worried that day and a few days after because my back account never showed a transaction that I got the room. Did that mean we stayed for free? Was there an error and the casino bosses were going to send some men after me to get their money back a la Ocean’s? No. It showed up a few days later, leaving my account looking pretty empty. Now I must eat buttered toast until my next paycheck. But it was worth it to enjoy an expensive yet budgeted vacation as a lower-to-mid middle class citizen. So you too can spend a day in NYC or a night at an elite casino resort like Foxwoods. However, the next time, I’d want to stay at the Grand. I better start saving for that one now.