Las Vegas/San Francisco Oct '04

This unlikely trip happened solely because I had hundreds of thousands of Cathay Pacific air miles expiring at the end of 2003. As I've said before, I generally like the airline, although I think it's gone downhill a bit lately. But their Asia Miles frequent flyer program is the very worst in the world. I spent most of September 2003 trying to use the miles to go somewhere, anywhere, at any time, without success. You can only reserve up to one year out, so I figured I could beat the system by calling early in the morning, and asking for availability exactly one year out. Theoretically everything should be available because those seats weren't available the previous day. But for a week I was told everything is booked. And that includes all classes, plus all the partner airlines. Which is ridiculous, because BA and Qantas had plenty of availability, but Cathay kept saying they had none on those same BA and Qantas flights. Anyway, this went on for a couple of months, but finally two seats opened up for San Francisco, so I grabbed them. Of course I wanted to go visit Stoli there, but the US wasn't really anywhere in my thinking for a holiday at the time. Which is why I pretty much hate frequent flyer programs. They waste huge amounts of effort trying to book a seat, and then you end up going somewhere you don't want to go at an inconvenient time, like midweek. But it feels like a tremendous waste to let them expire, which is why I wish they had never been invented.

Anyway, enough ranting, I had never been to Las Vegas, and thought it could be fun in a kitschy, let's make fun of everything sort of way, so we decided to start our West Coast adventure in Vegas, Baby!