Good Fortune at the Stratosphere Wheel of Fortune Machines
Well, when you look at the header of this page we must agree that’s more or less a give away of what happend. But we’re going to tell you the story anyhow (context makes these wins so much more fun). It was an interesting first day in Vegas.

We had just travelled 28 hours door to door to get to Vegas. We flew United from Amsterdam to Las Vegas with a short stop at Chicago O’Hare. Our first flight was uneventful and we arrived at Chicago on time. We had two hours to get through customs, get our bags, drop off our bags again, go through security and get to the right gate for our connecting flight to Vegas. All went smooth and we arrived at the gate 45 minutes before boarding time. We decided to walk through the airport a little bit since we had just been stuck in a plane for over 8 hours. When we returned to the gate (about 15 minutes before boarding should have started) we found out our connecting flight to Vegas was delayed due to a maintenance issue. Result: a 5.5 hours delay at Chicago O’Hare, no communication, 5 gate changes, no ‘sorry for your inconvenience’, nada! We arrived at the Stratosphere close to midnight while we should have arrived around 6:30 pm. It may come as no surprise, we felt like train wrecks.

Problem number 2: since there is a 9 hours time difference between Las Vegas and Holland we always need a couple of days to get our biorhythm back to normal. So the first couple of days, no matter what time we go to bed, we wake up around 5:30 am. So we arrived at the Stratosphere around midnight, checked-in, got to our room, took a quick shower and fell into a deep coma close to 1:00 am. And guess what, we woke up at 5:30 am, couldn’t sleep anymore but still felt like having the worst hangover ever.

Sorry for this 10 mile long intro for a gambling story but we’re trying to make you feel our state of mind during that first day in Vegas. Back to the story…

At 8:00 am we took a cab to Fremont Street and got long hauled by a cabby who obviously thought it’s never too early to rip off a tourist. Not a good start of the day. We visited all the downtown hotels/casinos, took a lot of pictures and had breakfast at the D.

Fremont Street was one big construction site and after looking around some more we decided we had seen enough of downtown. At 1:00 pm we took a cab back to the Stratosphere. No long hauling this time. When we arrived at the Stratosphere we looked at eachother and decided it was time for a stiff drink. We walked over to Fat Tuesday to get one of those 32 oz frozen cocktails and enjoy our cold beverages outside at the pool area, in the sun. When we sat down close to the pool, with our drinks, a waitress approaches us to let us know outside drinks were not allowed. With ‘outside’ they mean everything that isn’t purchased at the pool bar. We thought ‘outside’ meant off property. Our mistake but we had to leave and finish our drinks elsewhere.

We walked back into the casino and since we were too tired to walk around we decided to do some gambling and take the time we needed to drink our frozen cocktails. There was a bank of Wheel of Fortune machines (quarters) close to the pool entrance and there were a couple of seats available, good enough!.

We donated $20 and played max credit (3 quarters a spin). We got some small wins, a couple of spins on the Wheel of Fortune, enough to keep us playing for some time. We lost our first $20 and donated our next $20 bill. Again we got a lot of play for our $20. We had been playing for about 45 minutes and we were almost through our second $20. We got a bell ring, SPIN symbol on the third reel and that familiar sound Wheeeeeeel Of Fortuneeeeeee. The wheel started spinning and stopped at the grand prize of 1000 credits! Yeah, our first $250 win is there. That made up for all the negative things that had happend until then.

We played a little longer and cashed out at $270. This win covered all our expenses of the first day which was a sweet deal. Could this turn out to be a succesful trip in the gambling department?