We all slept In until the late morning. We made it to a late lunch plus desert to Cheesecake Factory, sat down at 2:29pm. Like always, Cheesecake Factory didn’t disappoint.
We headed to Barnes and Nobles for two reasons, first for the Atom to spend some time on his Human Geography AP studying and Marie to complete her Math homework. The second reason was of course to not waste a vacation outing without visiting a Barnes and Nobles bookstore.
I can’t believe we decided last minute to take advantage of Atom and Marie’s spring break and my upcoming b-day (April 26th) to spend it at Las Vegas and include a visit to the Grand Canyon and Hoover Dam.
After a few hours past our scheduled 1pm departure due to last minute errands, prep time, and some lunch, we finally headed to Vegas around 4:11pm. We arrived at our hotel, Treasure Island at 10:14pm after a few stops to stretch out our legs. The self kiosk-based checkin was easy and quick.
We settled our luggage in our room and quickly headed to an 11pm dinner at Wahlburgers. The Fiesta burger was scrumptious. Everyone was satisfied with the choice of burgers.
Too tired for sight seeing, we hurried back to our room for some relaxing and preparing for the next days. Walking around the strip was eye opening with some of the people walking around. Vegas is still a place for grown ups but we’re going to make this a fun and learning experience for the kiddos.
We also found that the iPhone camera doesn’t work well with the bright lights of the Vegas strip.
We snatched our tickets for the JPL Open House 2019 event. Woohoo! Although we achieved our goal of getting these tickets, the process was a highly intense few minutes. Jackie woke us up at 7:30 a.m. and we all headed downstairs to man our stations. We all logged into our assigned stations, Atom took his Windows system, Jackie took the iMac, Marie took the MacBook Pro, and I took the HP laptop. We started our browsers to the explore.jpl.nasa.gov site. Around 7:55 a.m., we started the refresh cycle to try to be the first to reserve our tickets to the JPL Open house event. Around 8 a.m., we all got into the reservation process screens but the forms weren’t activated, we kept hitting refresh without any luck. The desperation started creeping into the room, voices quickly raising about what to do. Waiting any longer and our chances of getting tickets was slowly diminishing. Starting from scratch would put us back in the virtual waiting line. So Jackie tried the reservation from her iPhone and it worked. She got in and reserved our tickets.
It was a crazy, intense, and nerve racking process but we survived. Thanks to Jackie we are keeping with the JPL tradition.
