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My dad and I met in Vegas for a weekend of golfing after I visited the huge Con/Agg convention with Kelly and Bill. We stayed at The Tropicana, a classic Vegas hotel that has fallen on hard times. The place is just a wreck. Every night and every morning there was trash in the hallways, bits of paper, candy bar wrappers, ashtrays (on our no smoking floor). Someone had smashed the glass fire extinguisher box near the elevators and there was broken glass on the floor this morning. It was really just pathetic. The safe in our room’s closet was malfunctioning so if I wanted to stash any valuables I was out of luck.

In a decent hotel you’d expect the maid service to do several standard things: replace the towels, toilet paper, Kleenex, and used toiletries (shampoo, conditioner, soap), make the beds, and throw the trash. I’ve been traveling a sick amount in the last six to ten years and I’ve gotten accustomed to getting at least those things done. Not at the Trop. They made the beds. That’s it. No new towels, no shampoo, no soap, trash wasn’t thrown … you get the idea. My dad and I both have pretty short hair, so it wasn’t until Sunday night that we had to call the front desk — press zero on the phone, all of the special phone buttons like bellhop, room service, security, etc. were inoperable — to request more shampoo. And that is when we realized that both of our iPods had been stolen.

His 30GB and my 60GB (with my favorite Sony headphones) were jacked from room 559 at some point between about 6pm and midnight on Saturday. I know it was between those hours because that was the only time period in which my laptop bookbag — where I had stashed my iPod — was not locked in the trunk of dad’s rental car. We took our laptops and stuff like that with us when we went golfing, and left them locked in the car when we were away from the hotel room. Sucks.

The Tropicana is across the street from the fabulous MGM Grand and next door to the extremely fun Hooters Casino and Hotel.