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mnranger5 · 6 years

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Adult Spring Break 2019, Las Vegas, Lake Havasu & Phoenix, 3/5/19 - 3/10/19

It’s hard to imagine a winter any worse than last winter - the winter of 2018. The prolonged bitter cold and crippling snow storms seemed recordbreaking at best, and the start of an ice age at worst. We had a train of storms well into April dropping 8 inches of white concrete, one after the next. Spring was nowhere to be found. The ice out date on Crystal Lake (April 30, 2018) was the latest date since records began being kept in 1974. After that kind of winter, we were due for a mild winter in 2019… Last week I caught a headline that read: “2019 Minnesota Winter – One of the harshest in modern times.” Without dwelling too much on the negative, here were a few fun nuggets in the article: Multiple rounds of record breaking cold (temperatures 30-40 below zero), as late in the season as March Multiple rounds of record breaking windchills of 50 to 60 below zero Record amounts of snow in February for the Tiwn Cities - 39 inches - shattering the old record of 26.5 inches set in 1962 Potentially catastrophic and historic flooding this spring due to the melt off of our record snow pack. The hazards of winter have had a significant impact on our travel plans over the past couple of months. Right after Christmas, we were supposed head to Duluth for a ski weekend with the kids. A big storm dropping more than a foot of snow hit at the exact same time, making travel impossible north of the Twin Cities.

Then, an actual blizzard in late February prevented Dyan and I from making a trip to Lawrence, KS, to celebrate my 40th birthday at a Kansas Jayhawks game. That storm was crazy! A day before we were supposed to leave, the mega storm with 60mph winds dumped over a foot of snow on southern MN and norther IA.

Interstates 35 and 90 were shut down for two days as DOT crews removed deserted automobiles and cleared 10 foot drifts across the highways. No Jayhawks game for us!

The winter has taken a physical toll on Dyan and I too. Let’s just say we didn’t score too many 10’s from the neighbors as they watched us try and clear our driveway and sidewalks of snow.

We desperately needed a break from winter. And Spring Break with Dyan’s folks in the southwest desert sounded wonderful. As a bonus, Mike and Rachel decided to come on the trip unbeknownst to Denise and Tony. That surprise only added to the fun on this trip.

March 5, 2019 It was an early flight into Vegas, so we were up at 4:30AM, and in the Uber at 5:15. We rendezvoused with Mike and Rachel who were already in the terminal and waited to board. Not gonna lie, we were super lucky with this flight. A day earlier, we had been upgraded to convenience class and were sitting just behind 1st class. We made a quick trip through the de-icing before we were wheels up and destined for warmer weather.

We landed in Vegas around 8AM and made a quick stop over to Dollar Rental Car for Mike & Rachel’s vehicle. They chose a Nissan Altima and we made quick work of exiting the rental car center. As soon as we hit the Vegas streets, Mike got a Low Tire Pressure Warning. His rear passenger tire was at 23psi, and should have been at 35psi. Ugh, do we really have to go through this again???

We made it safely over to New York New York Hotel and had a quick chicken & waffles breakfast at Bruxie. Temps were in the 60’s, the sun was shining, so the outdoor patio was a no-brainer for us! After breakfast we wandered around the strip. We decided to have a beer and wait for Tony & Denise at Rock & Reilly’s. Note to self: never step foot in this establishment again – the bathrooms at 10AM were absolutely filthy, like, vomit all over the sinks filthy. We opted for the Las Vegas Blvd. patio which was actually really nice. Mike and Rachel hid inside the bar while Dyan and I greeted Tony and Denise on the patio. Then once we were all settled, Mike and Rachel popped out and surprised their parents! The surprise factor was an easy 10!

After a couple of drinks, we wandered aimlessly down the strip as Denise took in the company of her daughters. Later that afternoon, we walked to the Stratosphere. I had no idea it was so tall?

The rest of the afternoon, we wandered the strip, stopping for beverages and a bite to eat at Gilley’s.

After dinner, we took in the Bellagio fountain which was wet to Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance. An odd music choice for the fountains...

Then, we moved on to gambling. Dyan and I played Buffalos, Willy Wonka, and just about any other open machine we could find.

I think we were all pretty exhausted from the long day, so we all haded off to our rooms for some sleep by 11PM

First thing in the morning, Dyan and I were back at the slots! We were about even money so far on the trip. Tony then introduced Mike and I to craps. It was a $5 table, and it was empty. A great time to learn.

I changed $60, Mike and Tony each changed $100, I think. Here we go. All we had to do was not roll a 2, 3 or 12 on the first toss. Mike was up first. He slung the dice toward the end wall. The ricocheted in different directions. Then stopped. Boxcars! Dang! The three of us lost. Okay, let’s try again. My turn to toss. I fire the dice down the table, but the fell short of the wall. As they lay on the table, the dealer yelled “3!” Are you kidding me? Lose again. Tony’s turn. Tony flopped the dice down the table and they landed on 9. Yes, time to make a bet. I put $30 in bets on the table. On the second roll, the only losing number is a 7. Please no 7. Tony ripped the dice down the table careening off the back wall. It was a 7. I had just lost $40 on three rounds. Let’s try again. Mike was up again. All numbers are good except 2, 3 and 12. He bounced the die off the wall and landed snake eyes. Are you serious. Mike had just thrown the two most difficult combinations in two consecutive tosses. We lost again. My turn. It was a broken record at this point. I threw a 6 on my first throw which opened up betting, but on my next toss I threw another 7. Loser. I had successfully lost all of my $60 in five rounds.

At that point, the girls walked up to the table. After a brief discussion of how bad this was going, Dyan handed me $150 and said have fun! NICE!

By this point, Tony was out. He’d lost his hundo. Mike still had $15. I was feeling better. Some new life came to the table. We now had 4 people playing opposite of us. They began rolling the die. The first two guy lost Mike and I a bit more money. But then two women started throwing. And were they ever hot throwers! All they did was keep throwing the numbers Mike and I were betting. After an hour, I had made back the initial $60 I had lost and profited about $100. It was a very good sequence of rolls for us!

Around 9AM, Mike and Rachel headed for Hoover Dam while Dyan and I took the scenic drive with Tony and Denise over to Lake Havasu. Once situated at their house, Tony and I took the ferry over to the town of Havasu Lake.

This small town has a rinky dink casino full of locals. I love it. Reminds me of the casinos in Deadwood. Right off the bat, I hit a free spin bonus on Wonka that paid out a nice $50!

Tony and I spent about 2 hours there having beers with his brother, Greg and beating the house on their machines, and the blackjack table. Later that evening Mike and Rachel arrived and we went out to dinner at Javelina Cantina.

The hotspot in Lake Havasu is right around the London Bridge. Tons of bars and restaurants flank both sides of the original London Bridge. The bridge was actually transported from England in the 70′s to Lake Havasu and rebuilt, stone by stone over the man-made canal. This was the kickstarter for the tourism industry here.

After dinner, we took a walk across the bridge to the official Spring Break Headquarters, Kokomo Bar. Our spring break was fortunately two weeks early for the college herds that swamp the town. Good news for us, no long lines for drinks or entertainment.

Obviously, the first picture is a nice little game of pool where Tony kicked my butt. The second picture is a game called A-Holes, which despite the name, was a really spin on the traditional bags game. This third picture is kind of like a human beer game. It’s all fun and games until somebody gets stuck...

Time to shut the evening down and head home to bed. Except, Mike and I had an idea. After getting to the house, we searched the garage for fishing gear. The homeowner (Tony & Denise’s landlord), had a couple of fishing rods from the 70′s. His tackle box was full of melted worms and rusty hooks. We talked the girls into giving us a midnight run over to Walmart for fishing gear.

At 6AM, Mike and I were at the Havasu Canal, searching for bedding fish, right up on the shoreline. We fished for two hours, but only managed this little smallie.

Lots of giants were sitting on beds, but we couldn’t entice them.

Our fishing time was short because we needed to pick up the ATV rentals at 9AM. That is one activity we didn’t want to be late for!

After a quick walkthru, Mike and I were buzzing north along London Bridge Road looking for the most rugged terrain we could find.

We burned up the front side of huge jumps and crawled around sheer mountainside cliffs.

We blazed through the hilly desert toward Signal Mountain occasionally stopping just long enough to clear the dust from our sunglasses and laugh about the number of shenanigans Mike was pulling or the 17-point turn my Family Truckster had to take to maneuver around hairpin turns.

It was an absolutely amazing ride through the Havasu backcountry!

To top off the fun, we were able to get the Can-Am’s down on the shores of Lake Havasu!

After 4 wheeling around Havasu, we made a quick stop at home for lunch and a shower before heading back out for our next excursion of the day. Mike and I had a guided fishing trip planned for the afternoon.

When we were planning this trip, we all spent lots of time trying to track down a fishing guide who would take us bass fishing. That proved to be much harder that expected for a Top 100 Bassmaster ranked lake in the middle of its giant bass spawning. There should have been guides lined up left and right at the marina. That was not the case. As it turns out, Havasu only has two resident fishing guides. Shawn Bailey, the only dedicated bass fishing guide was booked. Captain Chris Blythe who fishes for just about anything that bites, was also booked the first couple of times we called him. However, just a few days before the trip, Mike called Captain Blythe again. He indicated he had a cancelation and could fit us in for a 5 hour afternoon trip. Sold!

We were told to meet him at Bass Tackle Master, the local bait shop. A gigantic pontoon rolled into the lot. Surely this wasn’t our vessel, was it? Where is the sparkly, metal-flake-20 foot bass boat? In the door walks a big dude, who introduces himself as Chris Blythe. Yep, that’s the boat we are fishing in…. So much for trolling along the shoreline and sight fishing for bedding bass. So much for nimbly fitting into back creeks in search for some spawning giants. So much for bass fishing..

And it only got more comical from there. Chris told us to go ahead and head out to the boat – “We will be a few more minutes because we’re waiting for a couple more guys.” Wait, what? Did he say a couple more guys? So, not only are we going fishing on a party barge, but it’s also with a group of at least 4 guys. As it turned out, it ended up being 6 guys fishing, plus Captain Blythe and his dock hand, Gil. Before it could even get started, Mike and I were ready for it to be over… Five of us loaded into his Suburban for a 20 minute drive over to the launch. His Suburban didn’t have AC. I was stuck in the middle of the backseat – quite fitting for how the trip was going.

Since we clearing weren’t going to be casting for smallmouth or largemouth bass, I asked Chris what was biting on the lake. His response was priceless. “Stripers (striped bass). But when you text your wives that the stripers are biting, make sure you spell stripers with one “P”. If you misspell it, I am going to be in a lot of trouble with them.” For as poor as the trip was, at least we had a little comic relief.

Gil and Chris launched the pontoon and told everybody that we need to “catch” our bait. They grabbed a bait net and bucket and headed over to the public fishing dock. At least a dozen other people on the fishing dock also had bait nets. Everybody was trying to throw their nets over the quick moving school of shad that danced underwater all around the dock. Chris would spot the school and throw his net . The school of shad was likely in the thousands, and crazy fast. Chris came up empty on his first toss. Mike and I, both have polarized glasses, so it was much easier for us to spot the shad through the sun glare. Mike called out to Chris that he saw them and Chris hurriedly launched the net on top of Mike’s spot. He came up empty again. Everybody on the dock was coming up empty. Chris tossed his net over and over and over.

Occasionally, he’d get lucky and haul the net out of the water with one or two shad in it. If he hits the school just right with the net, he could have hundreds of shad caught. He said there have been times he had so many shad in the net it was too heavy to pull from the water. Geez! Not today. While waiting for Chris to get bait, we witnessed a guy catch a 5lb smallmouth bass right off the dock. Did we ever have the itch to catch a giant like that! We spent 45 minutes watching Chris fail at catching bait. We had a total of 12 shad when Chris finally said, let’s go fishing.

By the time we were to our first fishing location, we were 90 minutes into the trip. Time to start fishing. By this point, the wind had really ratcheted up, and was blowing at 15mph sustained, with gusts from 20-25mph. White caps were blazing across the lake. Weather was in the 70’s, so at least it was warm. The plan was for us to drift with the wind in 30-35FOW dragging 1oz. sinkers and a live bait/shad rig across the bottom of the lake. Apparently this is where the stripers were about a week ago. Chris and Gil handed everybody rods. We all sent our bait to the bottom of the lake and waited. With the gusts of wind we were having, it took us no time at all to blow through our drift path. We tried a couple of different spots, but nobody was getting bit. We began losing our precious shad from some tree snags at the bottom of the lake.

After 2 hours of fishing, we were all out of shad, and had not a single fish in the boat. Chris motored back over to the public dock and tried to catch more shad. His numerous attempts that came up empty were really starting to hurt morale. Once again, locals were catching stripers and small mouth left and right off the dock. Good ones too. A couple of the guys on our charter passed me saying “this is such a joke.” I almost felt bad for Chris. He was trying his best to catch bait, but just couldn’t find many shad. After another hour of searching for bait, we had 7 shad. I guess that was enough for us each to throw one more line into the water.

We boarded the pontoon again and headed back out into the heavy wind. Once again, we made a super-fast drift across the lake. We were moving so fast, I don’t think most of our baits were even on the bottom. Not surprising, none of us got a bite. On our way back into the marina, Chris said, “I’ve had some bad days on the water, but this is probably the worst.” I would have to agree, it was pretty bad. But at least we had this nice sunset!

We rendezvoused with the family for some dinner at Barley Bros Restaurant and Brewery before heading back to Kokomos for a drink. We hatched a plan that evening of finding pull tabs. The google told us Gallagher’s Pub, a 10 minute drive up the hill had pull tabs. Let’s go!

Gallagher’s was sketchy. From the moment we walked in, we didn’t feel very welcome. There was a card game going on in the corner of this dark bar. Heaping stacks of cash were being pushed across the table. Some of the money went into pockets, some into envelopes. I presume the owner, took one stack of cash and loaded the bar’s cash register with it. Some of the cash went into the lottery machine and some of the cash was handed to the cook, who was oddly hanging out at the bar. I don’t know what was going on in this place, but it didn’t give off a very good vibe. We played pull tabs and pulled a $100 winner. We quickly found out that pull tabs in AZ is quite a bit different than MN. First off, AZ does not cross off the winning tickets, so the player never knows how many good tickets are left. Second, AZ has no idea how to cash a winning ticket. I took the winner to the bartender and she said it would be a few minutes. She needed cash to pay me. Twenty minutes later, the owner walks over to the register and pulls a wad of cash from his pocket. Yep, I was being paid from the wad of cash in the owner’s pocket. What was going on here? As we were finishing our drinks the one of the bar employees got into a shouting match with the bartender about cash, and giving cash to customers. This place is messed up. We got out of there after one drink.

The next morning, Mike and I were up early, again, for some shore fishing near London Bridge. Like yesterday, the big girls were out, but not biting. We fished for two hours until the girls met us down at the lake for some breakfast at Shugrue’s. Tasty. The we had a urgent matter to attend to. Mike’s tire. Over the past couple of days, his tire was losing air pressure rapidly. Mike and I spent an hour driving from shop to shop looking for quick service. All the big name places had huge lines. We stopped an old garage called Tire Mart. This was the kind of place we were looking for. They serviced Mike’s tire immediately and found the screw lodged in his tire.

For $20, we were all patched up and back on the road in under 30 minutes.

That afternoon, we headed to Phoenix. What should have been a 2.5 hour drive turned into 4 hours as we drove through the heart of rush-hour traffic. First stop was our hotel, the Sheraton Grand at Wild Horse Pass. This place is a little slice of Heaven on earth!

We sat around the pool drinking Heizenburgs (some combination of whisky & lemonade) and Key Lime Coladas for a couple of hours as we waited for the ballgame. We probably would have left much earlier, but we were waiting as long as possible for the traffic to mellow out a bit. Still it took over an hour to get to Camelback Ranch Stadium in Glendale.

And once again, Dyan WAY overdid it with tickets. Are front row seats behind home plate good enough? Geez, what a great experience to witness a game that close. Royals ended up beating the Dodgers, 7-5, and we had the best seats in the house to witness a three run homer by Whit Merrifield.

Later that night, Mike and I got a bonfire going out on the patio while the girls gabbed at the bar.

Temps were in only in the 60’s. Had it been a bit warmer, we would have certainly hit the pool for a late night swim.

But instead it was off to bed early. A major winter storm was bearing down on the Midwest – forecasters were calling for 8-12” of snow.

We had intentions of spending the entire next day lounging at the pool before our evening flight home, but Delta allowed us to change our flight so that we could get home before the big storm hit.

So instead of a day soaking up some rays, we woke up at 5AM so we could get to the airport for our 8:00 flight. Lame.

Just before hopping on the flight, the radar was lighting up as the storm was bearing down on MN. We landed in Minny around noon under cloudy skies.

What really sucked about this is that the mega-storm was a complete bust, at least for the south metro. We picked up only 2 inches of snow. The airport never shut down, and most flights that evening were on-time. For the third time in three months, Winter 2019 disrupted one of our vacations. When is spring?

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