Sweet Nothings

If you were lucky enough to be at my recent wedding, here is the stuff I wrote about each of the seven casinos that we used as tables during the evening meal. If you weren't there, you probably won't have a clue what's going on, but you're welcome to have a read anyway. Opened : December 18, 1993 Cost to build:  $1 billion Rooms : 6,852 Total gaming space : 15,930 sq m Slot machines : 2500+ Ben and Becky stayed at the Grand for three nights. We were impressed with the size of the room, which was bigger than both our current and former flats, and had a TV which spun around so you could watch it from either the bed or the sofa (to be fair, Ben was more interested in this than Becky). We also paid to see Bon Jovi at the Garden Arena, but then the Grand Canyon re-opened so we ended up going there instead. We mostly don’t regret it. The MGM originally had a Wizard of Oz theme, including an ‘Emerald City’ attraction complete with the Yellow Brick Road and a...

Brooklyn Bridge Because we'd both been to New York before (many times for my wife, just the once for me - see here  and here ), we were lulled into a mistaken feeling of being fully prepared for it. A typically hair-raising cab ride full of last-second lane changes and blaring horns was enough to dispel that notion. Then we arrived at the dreaded Blue Moon Hotel. Now, there are no shortage of glowing testimonials and 'Top 150 New York Hotel' certificates on the walls, and Tripadvisor has some gushing reviews. We however found this establishment shabby at best and dirty at worst, and the management's responses to the negative TA reviews are distinctly tetchy. Perhaps we'd been spoilt by all those huge rooms and honeymoon upgrades. And perhaps with it being an old building on the hip Lower East Side, with rooms named after golden age stars of stage and screen, the target audience doesn't mind the questionable hygiene, or finds it edgy and cool. Read the r...

Lots of food available here. "Where everybody knows your na-ame/And it pisses down with ra-ain..." We thought we'd come prepared for the change in climate. We'd packed our cases full of warm clothes and although carrying heavy raincoats around tropical Florida seemed rather incongruous, we knew they would come in handy when we reached autumnal Boston. (And actually we felt quite smug when we were able to wear them on two unseasonably cold nights in Disney.) Sadly, nothing could quite prepare us for the sudden descent from bright, clear skies through an extra-thick duvet of cloud into a wall of bleak, unrelenting drizzle. After a fairly harrowing bus journey to our hotel, we managed to drag ourselves down the road to enjoy a late lunch of local specialty lobster roll, then promptly returned and shut ourselves in for the rest of the day. Lest you feel too sorry for us, I should mention that we were upgraded to a ginormous  eighteenth-floor suite. Married lif...

Ironically, it actually was freezing that evening. Stupid unseasonal weather. There are many ways to do Disney. Back in 2007 I had a fantastic holiday in the Orlando area with (or should I say in spite of) an ex and her friends, but we stayed in a villa a few miles away in Kissimmee and failed to execute any kind of forward planning. This time, my beautiful new wife and I splashed out to stay in the Beach Club, one of Disney's own huge array of resorts (it being our honeymoon and all) and we... okay, she planned everything down to the last detail. If 'Strictly Regimented Fun' isn't Disney's motto then it should be. The exhaustive and exhausting Unofficial Disney Guide book contains hundreds of pages of info on every possible aspect of your trip to the Greater Orlando area. This book. Dining plans. Fastpass plus. Touring plans. Early entry. Extra magic hours. All these are your weapons in the war against Disney queues and fully booked attractions. Beach Cl...

So, although I was able to upload Blogger posts absolutely fine on my crappy old Netbook that took 20 minutes to boot up, it turns out to be near impossible to do so on our expensive new iPad. Cheers for that, Mr Jobs. Still, one consequence of not being able to put up these posts while we were away is that I can moan about the absolute crapness of changing planes at Miami airport without fear of being detained when I try to leave the US on charges of sedition or being a smartarse. Although I would actually quite like to go back to the States at some point, so ignore that paragraph. (And memo to Apple: that dig against your products was just friendly banter, in case you're reading.) Tiny tiny plane~! One good thing about having to change at Miami was that we got to travel the last leg of our journey to Key West in a tiny plane that was only three seats wide, and had a beautiful aerial view of the Keys at sunset as we flew in to an airport about the size of the WH Smit...