Tuesday, November 5, 2019

On the road again

I've just started a trip that I've been putting off for a while - I'm now in Las Vegas and will be between here and LA until the end of the month. I really don't like being away from home for this long but a flight back home from the west coast solely for the weekend just isn't as viable as from the east coast. When I'm in NY I'll often take a Friday evening flight, sleep on the short service and arrive back home early Saturday morning before having a weekend with the cost centres before returning on a Monday flight where I can work most of the way so as to not waste a day.

But flights from the west coast are a lot more expensive than from NY due to the increased distance plus the lower number of flights home. Plus the extra 3 hours time difference is a killer when trying to avoid jet lag so I've bitten the bullet and decided to not travel home until at least after Thanksgiving, after which my trips to the US will probably dry up until the new year.

I arrived on Monday and did my usual routine of settling myself in gently. Or I would have done if I'd been remotely sensible, which I'm not. I went nuts.

It's a late afternoon flight from London so I worked at home in the morning before heading to the airport at lunchtime, arriving just after 2pm for a 4pm flight. Some drinks were consumed in the lounge, then some more with lunch and a welcome drink on boarding the plane.

Once we were airborne I scooped a couple of drinks whilst working for a few hours then having something to eat with another couple of drinks before having a few hours nap ahead of landing around 7pm feeling totally refreshed. It's 8.30 or so once I've checked in at the Signature, unpacked and showered before deciding what to do. If this blog were titled "Tales of low stakes poker and boring normality" I obviously would have had an early night - but it's drunken idiocy isn't it. Which I got in spades.

I headed straight to the poker room and got seated almost immediately - pretty unremarkable 7 hour session coupled with far too many beers than is healthy and I stumbled back to the room around 4am.

Up at 8am today and after a few coffees I'm starting to feel slightly more human than expected but I've got work to do so no more shenanigans to report for a few days, I'm heading to LA on Wednesday and Thursday but I've deliberately kept Friday clear to hopefully kick off the weekend with a good dose of drunken idiocy, starting with watching Norwich City play in the Premier League with a midday Friday kick off. Beers, of course, will be consumed once I've decided where to watch the game.

The rest of the weekend I've got no major plans apart from intending to play some poker and drink my own body weight in beer - it's always good to have achievable goals.

6 comments:

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  2. If we assume your weight at 70kg which equates to about 70 liters and a typical beer bottle at .350 mL, you are looking at about 200 beers this weekend!

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    1. Haha. I’ve been told a million times not to exaggerate!!

      Don’t confuse the Americans with the metric system - I once had someone tell me that since I was European I must use those goddam keel-o-grams which he said he’d never be able to understand. We Brits can use metric or imperial but the Americans use different imperial measurements than everyone else - our pints are 20% bigger than a US version so we get more beer!

      You’ve given me an idea though - I’m going to keep a tally of my booze intake for this trip and see how close I get to drinking my body weight. Non beer intake will be classified as a beer equivalent so a double G&T would be the same as 2 bottles of beer. I’m here for nearly a month albeit I don’t really drink during a work week but I’ve got a long weekend coming up this weekend to get my numbers up.

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    2. Haha, look forward to the final count!

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  3. A seven-hour poker session after all that travel? I imagine that with your tiredness and beer that you were likely quite good at entertaining your fellow players!

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    1. I was definitely flagging towards the end although I’d had about 3 hours sleep on the plane - acclimatising going west is a lot easier than going east

      I’ve been (and seen others) in a worse state for sure though

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