This morning I had to do that test for linguistics, but I couldn’t get the wireless working at all. I eventually gave up and used one of the computers in the lobby - thank goodness there was one available. I discovered that once you logged in, you couldn’t stop the test, or you would be locked out. Fortunately it didn’t take me very long, although it was long enough for one or two people to mill around hoping for a computer. I wasn’t about to give mine up, though! Luckily the other users moved out and the people waiting got to move in. I finished the test relatively quickly at least. While I was working on it, A negotiated a 25$ reduction in our total hotel bill. The hot water in the shower has quit working again, and the bathroom light and outlet still don’t work either.

We went to get breakfast but that turned into a fiasco. A wasn’t really listening to me at the Burger King drive-through, so I missed the opportunity to say “I can’t read anything but Pancakes and Hash Browns, can you tell me what else they have, since it’s all in Spanish?” I ended up with a packet of hash browns. We pulled over to eat, and I went in to see if I could figure out my order. No good - the desayuno menu wasn’t even inside, and all the lunch/dinner food was meaty. I was pretty discouraged, but I had seen a 7-11 down the street, so I said I’d walk down there. No dice: it was boarded up and closed. By this point I was really annoyed but I was also ready to give up. A was going to drive down the street looking for a shop she wanted to go to, but I saw a Subway so I asked her to pull over there. It turned out there was a bagel shop next door, so I went there, and waited about a million years for a bagel with cream cheese. Next we had to return the car, which meant I had to drive; when I was done with my bagel we pulled over and switched drivers. And I promptly got lost. We could have had the GPS do it but we didn’t have the actual address of the place, so we had to call them up and they talked us in.

After all the rental stuff was taken care of, their guy drove us to Calle Fortaleza in Old San Juan, which is a big shopping area. We wandered around shopping for hours. I was wearing my very old Lesbian Avengers shirt, and I got a couple of comments on that today. We stopped for lunch and I had a mojito and some weird Greek-inspired tofu dish that was kind of odd. We walked and shopped some more, and I kept having to sit down on the floor and then get up again as A moved from shop to shop. Eventually I asked if we could take a break, and we stopped at Barrachina to get drinks at the bar. We each had a Bacardi cocktail and a piña colada, though A had me help her with her piña colada. We shopped some more after that, and I happened to turn on my GPSr just 500 feet from a geocache, so I went and found it - a very nice one! After we finally finished shopping, we waited for the trolley to take us to the bus station. We waited, and waited…to no avail. We ended up walking to the bus station, which wasn’t as far away as I had feared. And then we waited, and waited…to no avail! There must have been 20 people waiting with us for the A-5 bus, and finally another driver took pity on us and told his boss that he was going to switch to the A-5 route. We all piled on his bus and got on the road. It was a little difficult to see out around all the people, and we worried we would miss our stop, but we managed to spot it in time and we got out. I got another comment on my shirt on the way off the bus, from a couple I’d pegged as lesbians right away, but who obviously didn’t notice that we were, since we’re both femmes. *snorts*

Anyway, we walked up the stairs of the pedestrian bridge, crossed the highway, and went down the other side. We came to the room, I got ice, and A started laundry in the machines that are available for guests. Right now I am drinking an old 20-oz soda bottle full of vodka, Diet Welch’s Grape Soda, and Tropicana Light Fruit Punch. Yes, it sounds vile, but it tastes okay. The reason I am drinking it is because we’re not allowed to bring alcohol on the ship (at least, not supposed to) so I have to drink it tonight! That’s why this entry might sound a little funny…as I’ve been writing it, I’ve been getting tipsier. Tomorrow we get on the boat. Checkout here is 12 noon and check-in on the boat begins around 1pm I think. We won’t be able to go anywhere after we’re on board, because Celebrity docks at the far pier rather than the one that’s at the base of Old San Juan. So once we’re on, I will relax, and try to figure out my powerpoint presentation thing for Sex and Gender class. Good night!

On my last day in Las Vegas, I once again walked a lot - about four or five miles. I thought of something I should have bought at the Star Trek place, so I caught the monorail from Harrah’s to the Hilton. I spent forever in the gift shops again, and got what I needed.

My next stop was to be Luv-It Frozen Custard, which I’d read about somewhere or other. I had only had a muffin for breakfast and the custard shop didn’t open until 1pm, so I figured I’d get lunch on the way. It was a little confusing as I made my way back to the Strip on foot; I had figured I’d be able to get there if I just headed for the big buildings. It was extremely windy, and all day as I walked along I got dust, sand, and grit in my teeth and eyes. It wasn’t pleasant but there also wasn’t anything I could really do about it.

The only place I stopped along the way was a head shop to take a picture of the funny sign they had on display, so I ended up getting to the custard place about 40 minutes before it opened. I wasn’t the only person to arrive early - at about 5 minutes to 1:00 a guy pulled up and sat in his car waiting. Once the place opened I had to wait a bit more for the flavor of the day, but then I got my treat and headed back to the Strip.

I passed the Stratosphere but decided the rides at the top probably weren’t operating due to the high winds, so I didn’t go up. I kept walking, and I suddenly noticed that the NASCAR Café had a roller coaster in front of it - and it was operating! I had thought I’d already hit all the coasters on the Strip, but since I hadn’t been on this one I went in and paid $10 to ride. When I was done I headed right back out to the Strip and kept walking south.

I was heading for the Mirage, because I wanted to see the white tigers and the dolphin habitat. We had passed the tiger display the night before going to the Love shop, but the big cats had already been put to bed for the night. I cut through Treasure Island to get to the Mirage, and headed for the dolphin area first. Let me tell you: that is the biggest ripoff on the Strip. They had three dolphins doing tricks in a main pool for just a few minutes, and then they were put back into a small, featureless pool with underwater viewing windows. If you’re not familiar with dolphins, you might not know this, but they are extremely intelligent and require play and ways to entertain themselves. Their holding pool was 100% empty, but the permanent “smiles” on their faces fooled most visitors into thinking they were happy anyway. There were two more dolphins in a huge research pool elsewhere, but those two were just hanging out by the gate, hoping to get let through. I was so disappointed at the situation these dolphins were in that I couldn’t even look at the garden included in the $15 admission price. If you have ever seen a dolphin elsewhere, then you already know what they look like, so don’t waste your money visiting these. I’d love to do the Mirage’s $500 “trainer for a day” program and find out more about their facilities, and why they treat them the way they appear to be treating them. On my way out, I went by the tiger display, where there was a single bored-looking white tiger pacing and occasionally catching a drink.

I got back to the hotel and I was ready to relax for a couple of hours, but A’s training let out early and she came in 45 minutes after I did. We decided to have dinner at Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba, a tapas place that was recommended to me. The wait for an inside table was 30 minutes, but they had those patio warmers around the outdoor seating, so that’s where we sat, and we were plenty warm! Their specialty seems to be sangria, so we ordered half a pitcher of passionfruit sangria and some tapas. We finished the sangria pretty quickly and the waiter offered to bring us some more, so we ended up having a merry time during dinner. I took A into the Wynn on the way back so she could see their lovely bright mosaic floors. Once we were back in the hotel room, she started to pack and I started on my solemn duty of drinking up all the leftover soda and vodka - so I had a very fun last few hours in Vegas.

Our trip home today was entirely uneventful. We arrived at the airport in plenty of time, waited in the long security line, and headed for the gate. The flight itself was long with lots of turbulence, but otherwise fine.

I did a lot of walking yesterday - about six miles. I played on the computer for a while in the morning, had a way over-priced breakfast in the Grand Canal Shoppes, and then set out around 11:30 for the roller coaster at New York-New York. I got to the casino about 30 minutes later, and it’s 1.5 miles, so that’s right about average walking speed for a human.

The line for the ride was pretty short, but I was annoyed that I’d had to put everything into a locker. I was there by myself, so without my Sidekick or iPod I had nothing to do. But the line moved along pretty quickly, and I rode by myself (with nobody next to me, that is) in about the middle of the train. The coaster itself was really good, probably because I had no idea what was coming. The entrance and queue are inside, and from street level you can’t see much of the track, so it was all a surprise and I enjoyed it.

I thought I’d go over to the M&M’s World across the street and see about getting lunch there, but it turned out to be just a giant store. I put together a bag of M&M’s from the colormix section, but that was all I felt like getting. I had lunch at a Mexican place next door and then went back to the hotel, walking through the Aladdin’s shopping mall area. It’s too bad they are tearing it down, it’s really attractive - the interior architecture makes me think of browsing a market in Casablanca.

In the evening, we had tickets to see Zumanity, the naughty show by Cirque de Soleil. We had a hard time getting my purple corset closed because my jeans were baggy, but we managed and A laced me up. We were going to take the Deuce bus to the show but the driver went right past us, so we scrambled to get a cab instead. The show itself was Cirque’s usual type of thing, but with more boobies. I really could have done without the heterosexist commentary from the guy on the left, though. There is one male homoerotic scene, and the guy was saying “ew” to himself. The rest of the time, if the performer was male, he was saying things like “where are the chicks,” and then when they appeared he said “yeah, now we’re talking” - I swear I wanted to pop him a good one. But overall the show was very good, although our seats could have been better.

We decided to walk back, and I saw a number of women staring at my waist, heh! We stopped in at the Mirage to visit the gift shop for Cirque’s show “Love,” which is set to Beatles tunes. I didn’t find anything there for myself because the pretty stuff was so expensive, oh well.

We took a taxi into St. George’s and had ourselves dropped off near the Grenada National Museum. It was a very tiny place; one of the major attractions was the marble bathtub used by Josephine Bonaparte when she was a child in Martinique. There were also exhibits on Grenada’s relationship with Great Britain, and the history of Grenada’s political turmoil during the mid-20th century. The first building was awfully cramped and dark, but after stepping outside and around a corner the second building (upstairs from the first?) had more space and light. The current highlight was an art exhibition, which was very nice. Another exhibit that interested me was the model of Grenada; it gave me a much better sense of the island’s physical layout than I’d had previously. After leaving the museum we stopped off at a convenience store (”Low Budget Drug Store” to be exact) to pick up some conditioner, because A and I knew our hair was going to be in awful shape from the salt water. We then visited two arty-crafty type stores, and C bought an expensive batik shirt in one of them. We wandered through the city for a while after that, ducking briefly into a supermarket and getting persistently invited for a tour of the fish market before getting ourselves lost by going in circles. :R: finally decided that we should split up, so he and A went one direction and C and I headed…up the hill. St. George’s seems to be on two very different levels, with major climbs and long staircases between them. C and I still managed to walk in a circle, so when I ducked into a bookstore to apply more sunblock (my shoulders had felt like they might be burning) we also picked up a map of the island. We wanted to sit down for a bit and look it over, so we headed toward the only semi-recognizable place: a “Royal Castle” that looked awfully like a White Castle (I didn’t see a single McDonald’s or other chain anywhere). On the way there, I had ended up a few feet ahead of C and found myself getting ogled a bit. He went to stand in line for sodas while I sat at a booth and started looking over the map, and I could feel the eyes of the young men at the next table boring into me and trying to get me to look up (I didn’t). When C came to the table, I put my arm around him in an attempt to discourage the guys…but it didn’t work, so I didn’t look up from the map the entire time we were there. C finally managed to figure out where we were and how to get where we wanted to be, so we set off again. We made it to the Carenage and peeked in a couple of shops before deciding to head back. It occurred to me that we should get some food before heading back to the Land Of Expensive Eating (aka our resort), so we wandered back to Hughes Street and stopped at the Island Thyme Cafe. I was delighted with their veggie pizza - it had lots of oregano, some carrots, and other vegetables. It only came in a whole pizza, so I had plenty to bring home, but Grenadian pizza seems to be thin crust so I ate it up fairly quickly because it wasn’t very filling. We caught a cab back to the hotel.