Vegas trip

We are home and had a great time, with a few bumps in the road. Literally. Ron had some issues and fell twice in the hotel room and once in the street when he hit a bump on the curb with the scooter. Over he went, right into the road. Thankfully, there were several good Samaritans on the street and I had many people helping to pick him up and get him back on the scooter. I was very thankful! He has a few bruises but he didn't break anything. (I'll post the "rest of the story" with regard to the falling issues in a bit.)

We stayed at the Luxor. I don't recommend it to anyone, especially if you are traveling with a disabled person. Or, a diabetic who needs to keep insulin cold. They don't provide refrigerators unless you pay an extra $20 per day for the privilege of having one in your room. No exceptions and if I had issues with it, I could take it up with "corporate" because that is who made the rules. Of course, management could have put one in the room anyway since it was just for insulin purposes. We were already spending a lot of money on the room and had the budget pretty much set in stone. An extra $20 per day doesn't sound like much in the grand scheme of things, but when you are skating by, the total ($80) is a big deal. Customer service isn't what it used to be, that's for sure....

The doors are very hard to get through if you're driving a scooter and there is no one to hold them open. I found one set of automatic doors at each main entrance but getting on and off the elevators can be a problem. To get to the rooms, you have to put your card key in the reader and then push the floor button. Ron could in no way do this. I had trouble getting it in the reader a couple of times before the elevator went somewhere else. We rode down and up more than once before we landed on our floor.

There were no drinking fountains to be had. I found out later that somewhere, between the two bathrooms is a drinking fountain. Evidently we were never there because we bought several bottles of water while we were there.

The Internet is not WiFi. It's hard-wired Ethernet cable that you have to string across the room, leaving it unsafe for others to climb over in an attempt to get from point A to point B. That was one fall for Ron... In order to use my laptop at the table and chairs that are in the room, I had to hold the laptop in my lap (novel idea... "laptop" in the lap!) because the chairs were too low to be comfortable using the table as a desk. Forget using a mouse. The Ethernet wouldn't stay connected and no matter how I did it, I would lose my connection every 10-15 minutes, which meant rebooting my computer each time. I made a personal trip to the front desk but the clerk neglected to put in the request for service. I finally got it fixed the day before we left.

The pool is closed for the season but I could take my room key and go use the pool and hot tub at Excalibur. If I had wanted to use Excalibur's pool I would have booked my room there. In hindsight, it would have been a better choice. If I wanted to use the on-site hot tub at the spa, it was an additional $10 per day (that is outside of the resort fee of $12.95 I was already paying for the "extra" services that I was receiving - like the pool, hot tub, Internet, etc.). Plus, I really didn't feel like traipsing between hotels in my swimsuit and towel. No thanks.

The decor of the hotel was beautiful. The main lobby areas were very nicely done. The "Shops at Luxor" in the Galleria consisted of just a couple of stores. The area was under construction. The gift shops there were nice with items consistent with what you'd find in other Vegas hotels.

There is a food court in the hotel where you can find McDonald's, Quiznos, and a pizza place. But unless you know where to look - or know how to "ask" where to look - you won't find them. We found them on our last morning there. When I asked about places to eat within the hotel, these places were never mentioned. Only the high dollar places were mentioned to me. We could have had more than one meal per day if we had found McDonald's sooner! Since there is no in-room coffee, I would have much rather paid McDonald's price for coffee than Starbucks!