This year, we Ipes were celebrating our sixth wedding anniversary. What to do, what to do? After much soul-searching, researching in dusty European libraries, and verifying our hypotheses through frightening lab experiments that no man should do, we decided on spending the weekend in Atlantic City. How did we come to this conclusion? My sister got me a gift card to the restaurants at the Tropicana casino’s The Quarter. It’s basically a large indoor mall that features shops and restaurants, and is connected to the Tropicana hotel.
Selecting a destination was one thing, but getting a room was another. Even in this economy, with a downtrodden hospitality industry, and the general seediness of AC, the basic rooms were still expensive. I’m talking over $300-$400 a night on a Saturday. I’ve never visited Atlantic City (and I’ve come close), but I couldn’t believe it. We considered hotels just outside AC, but some room rates eventually dropped as we got closer to our big weekend. The Tropicana itself was sold out, so we settled on the Atlantic City Hilton Casino Resort.
The plan was to drop the kids off to my sister and BIL at their place on Friday around 7pm, then drive off to AC. Murphy’s Law struck again, and neither of us could get the time to pack and stuff early enough in the week (and day), and still leave by 7pm. We ended up leaving around 10pm, and hit major traffic down the Turnpike. By the time we situated the kids, gave parting childcare instructions, and arrived in AC, it was around 2am.
The hotel was nice, but they gave us double beds. Ah, the romance began already. Luckily, we were able to switch the next day to a better room. 😉 We had dinner Fri night a la room service around 3am, and fell asleep watching infomercials.
Saturday entailed a late breakfast/lunch, spa treatment for my wife, and we rested some more, like God wanted us to. Saturday evening, we had dinner at Cuba Libre over at The Quarter. Excellent cuban food and 13 types of mojitos, btw, so I would highly recommend them. After dinner, we walked around the Tropicana, and my wife even won some money at the slots. She’s hot, the mother of my children, and she brings in the dough.
On Sunday, we slept in (what a glorious weekend!), checked out, and had lunch over at Il Mulino over at the Trump Taj Mahal. Geez, what a gawdy hotel. No wonder all the Indian events are held at the Taj Mahal — it’s like coming home to India, including the elephant statues. Il Mulino was a decent italian restaurant, but it was so busy/disorganized, we alternatively waited and ate our lunch over the course of 1 hour and 45 minutes. I noticed that all of the Trump descriptions plastered in brochures lauded how each Trump establishment (the restaurants, the clubs, etc.) were the best, or the finest, or the greatest. I could actually hear it in Donald Trump’s voice. Although Trump is lauding his italian restaurant as “legendary”, it was anything but.
We eventually picked up the kids, and got home tonight around 6pm. The great anniversary weekend is over, and it was extremely restful. I generally feel pretty guilty and doubtful that sleeping that much, but you know, we really needed to recharge. It was also great husband-wife-and-no-kids bonding time. Awesome and fun. Sometimes, you just want to eat your nice dinner, and not have to worry about cutting up someone else’s plate of food.
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