Atlantic City Bay-bee! (pt.2)

A Companion Trip to the US of A

If you’re going to get a Philly cheesesteak in Philly, make it authentic!

So we were off to Atlantic City…

Now, at this point you’d think that we were leaving Miki with his grandparents and going off to have a girl’s weekend in AC, and you’d be correct to think that. However, remember how I mentioned last time that the norovirus was going around? Well, on the morning of the 17th, we learned that Chrissy’s brother had had it a short while back, and on the 16th her stepdad hadn’t been feeling his best, and on that morning, her mom was throwing up and very sick… suffice to say, there was no way we could leave Miki behind with them at that point.

Great, we were going to our party weekend with a toddler! A toddler who might also have norovirus. Awesome… 

Needless to say, that changed our plans just a wee bit, but we were committed to having an awesome time, because that’s what we were there to do and besides, Miki’s far from the worst kid to be around. 

It’s a 3-hour drive from where we were staying to New Jersey, and we naturally passed through Philadelphia on the way. Chrissy thought we should stop in town while we were there, since we left a fair bit early and her friends from NJ wouldn’t be meeting us until after they were done work, so we turned off into town about halfway to AC. The thing to do in Philadelphia, Chrissy explained, was get an authentic Philly cheesesteak. Well, I’ve never had one before, so that sounded good to me, though I had a disappointingly small appetite from the jetlag. 

According to Chrissy, there are only three places in Philadelphia where you can get a true Philly cheesesteak: Pat’s (the original, I believe), Geno’s, and Jim’s (which was a little further away up on South Street). Chrissy tried to convince me to get a “Philly taco,” which is a Philly cheesesteak wrapped in a jumbo pizza slice, but that was more than my brain (and stomach) could handle. We went to Geno’s at first, but because they only took cash and we didn’t have any on us yet, we went to Pat’s instead. Now, the proper cheesesteak has Cheese Whiz on it, but there’s no universe in which I’ll consent to putting that plastic in my body, but fortunately, provolone seems to be an acceptable choice as well. Beyond that, it was just onion and meat… seems kinda greasy and gross, but it was actually rather tasty. To my surprise, the meat tasted better than any of the greasy gristly kebab meat I’ve ever tried in Finland. I regret only being able to eat about half of it. 

After that, we went over to South Street—the famous street in town, it seems—looking to see if a few places were still there that Chrissy remembered from back in the day. We didn’t find them when we were looking around, but we did still find something interesting: the world’s only cannabis museum!

Now, this is really interesting, because there seems to be some sort of exception in Philadelphia, as the state is only medicinally legal, while the city seems to have less strict rules somehow, which means that anywhere else in the state, you’d need to be a dispensary. The guys working there were extremely nice to us and very informative, happy to show us things. I hope people visit and realize that there’s a lot more types of people who smoke weed than just couch-locked burnouts.

This was a really neat place, which had a lot of assorted pieces of cannabis history on display, including some history on Mary Jane (I had no idea that she was a real person—I always thought that was just slang that came from marijuana), and I think they might have had Strain Hunters playing on the television. Even better, they also had a lot of scientific information on the substance, showing off the variety of cannabinoid chemicals and how they combine and interact to create different health benefits, as well as another picture with the plant’s anatomy. I had to pick up some souvenir Clippers (lighters) because I’ve started collecting crazy lighters when I’ve been in the Netherlands, so obviously I needed some from the only museum on the subject in existence.

One of the coolest things they had on display was a piece of the original film (as well as other memorabilia) from the original Reefer Madness tape. If you don’t know it, it was a piece of 1930s anti-cannabis hate propaganda that is truly one of the most scientifically inaccurate, fear-mongering, genuinely batshit insane things I’ve ever seen in my life.

We had a little walk down the street still, marveling at the street art and… trash, haha. Chrissy explained to me that Philly has its own rules when it comes to intersections and parking, which was certainly exciting. We were also pretty damned lucky that my parking angel was with me when we stopped for lunch because there was nowhere to park for blocks and blocks but we landed a spot only a block away. 

After we were done wandering South Street, we headed back to the car to head out to New Jersey and Atlantic City! We made one stop to gas up the car, at which point I learned that it is fully illegal to pump your own gas in New Jersey. Apparently this is an effort to reduce waste, increase station safety, and creates jobs. For me, it was a complete blast to the past, as I can’t think of anywhere in Canada off-hand that still does that (granted, I also haven’t been driving around regularly there for over a decade and a half, so I could be out of the loop). 

It took us only about an hour or so from Philly to Atlantic City. Chrissy was quite a diligent tour guide, telling me interesting local things, like how all of the names of places in the Monopoly board game are based off places and street names in AC, which I did not know. This led me to eventually reading this extremely interesting article about the history of the game, which I recommend checking out! Of the street names I remember (which are few and far between), we saw the famous boardwalk though and California Avenue, though I would have needed a copy of the game to remember the other names and recognize them.

We also saw the staggering wealth divide between the casinos. There was apparently some effort to use the casinos to improve the quality of life in AC that seems to have failed completely. This was the kind of place that we didn’t want to be walking around outside much, especially with a 4-year-old with us. It just didn’t feel super safe, unfortunately.  

View of the Jersey shore from the Chelsea Tower bridge at the Tropicana

We were the first to arrive, so we headed into the casino and found that it was one hell of a maze, with multiple hotel towers to navigate. Chrissy checked us in and we were all quite tired and cranky by the time we had navigated from the parkade, through the shops, into and up through the casino, across the connecting bridge, and finally into our room up in Chelsea Tower. We took it easy for a while as we were waiting for Chrissy’s friends, Jackie and Martie, to join us. In the meantime, I learned the lay of the land by trying to reverse engineer our way to the car to see if I could find Chrissy’s phone (it was hidden under some papers). It felt like a mile-long walk, but I was glad to be moving around a bit after all the driving. 

At this point, we regrouped a bit to figure out what our gameplan was while we waited for the others, having a couple drinks. We decided that, since we’re all a little neurospicy, that if anyone needed a little space or felt overwhelmed, they would hang in the room with Miki. Otherwise, we’d take turns so that everyone would be able to play in the casino and have some fun. 

Now, I have gambled exactly one time in the past, excluding the handful of times that I’ve dropped change into the local slot machines to clear out my pockets (which I don’t do anymore because Verkaus requires you to have a login these days). Chrissy had a very healthy attitude towards the casino, giving herself an allowance to play with, considering it the “entrance fee” for the weekend, while not allowing herself to take out more money if she loses it all. The one time I was at a casino when I was 19 showed me that my notorious poor luck is not something that will ever pay out when gambling (this, again, will come into play later in the night), so I decided that the one thing I would do for fun in the US was give myself a hundred bucks to learn how to play some of the casino games, and have some fun learning, knowing full well that I would lose it all. 

We were eventually joined by Jackie and Martie. Though Jackie was a fair bit younger than us, it seems she and Chrissy met one another some years ago in Finland, as Jackie was also an unhinged metalhead foreigner lurking around the country in her youth, though much like me these days, she’s rather over it and doesn’t find much of interest in the metal scene. I immediately really liked both of them, being friendly, kind people, easy to get along with and with a lot of personality. Our first stop was dinner at Hooter’s, because everyone was amused that I hadn’t been to one before. 

Inside the Tropicana Casino

I ordered a Caesar salad, as I love to do in other countries who actually know what a Caesar salad is. Seriously, Finns think that a Caesar salad is any salad with Caesar dressing on it and it drives me bananas. This one had too much sauce and the grilled chicken was a bit rubbery, but the sauce was nice, so I enjoyed it well enough. I even indulged myself in two tropical long island iced teas, thinking they’d be enough to drink for a night for me. I don’t know what was in them though, but I was not nearly as drunk as I felt like I should be, so perhaps they had less alcohol than your usual LIIT.

Now, remember how everyone had been suffering from some degree of norovirus? We were all a little on edge because we all suspected that we would get it at some point, and if Miki had it, he had it that day. He didn’t eat a whole lot and was somewhat less energetic than he usually is, which doesn’t say much because he’s 4, which means he’s generally pretty off-the-walls. Well, he said during dinner that he wasn’t feeling super well and had to go to the bathroom. Chrissy got up to take him and they went all of 2 meters before he vomited all over the floor, only just barely (hopefully) missing a guy sitting at the table next to us. The best part about this? Jackie was overjoyed, to an astounding degree. Apparently she and her sister have a thing with barf, relating to their youth, that they steered into, so nowadays vomit stories are some of her favorite things to hear. Not common, in my experience, but I had a few choice stories to share (looking at you, cousin Mark!) from back in the day. Yes, this is what we all talked about while continuing our dinner, haha. Now, I’m not convinced that the Hooter’s did a good enough job cleaning that chair before they sat someone else at the table though… grosssss.

After dinner, Miki was pretty wiped out. He was rather cute about it really, assuring us that we could go have fun and not worry about him—what a little darling. We had a 30-minute timer on to be with him, but he slept the whole time, more or less. I did take a shift once where he seemed to be wide awake, but he didn’t respond when I spoke to him, so I suppose he was just opening his eyes in his sleep like a little demon child, heh. 

Down in the casino, the girls showed me around. There was an obscene number of slot machines, but deeper in there were tables. Security guards regularly check your ID, so we went to get stamps from the security place to make things a bit smoother. It seems Martie also got some platinum card for something or other, since she works in the military and they get nice benefits at such places. We started by playing some blackjack and roulette at the electronic machines (which had cheaper buy-ins) to teach me how to play, before trying our hand at the tables. I did the best at black jack and roulette, but the slot machines were not my friend. I didn’t like them much either… if I’m going to lose, I prefer it to be on my own failures and poor luck, not just poor luck alone. 

After I got an idea of how things worked, we went over to the tables and tried our hand there. Again, I did surprisingly decent at roulette, which was maybe my favorite. After a while, the girls were reasonably sauced… I was not, though I can’t explain why? Maybe my delta-9 drink from the museum curbed the feeling of drunk, but considering how rarely I consume alcohol at all these days, I’m quite sure that I should have been plastered. Lucky me? So the girls went off to bed sometime before or around midnight, leaving Chrissy and I waiting for Mary to arrive. 

Mary works over in New York and had a long day on that Friday, so she didn’t get off until 9 p.m., meaning it took her until around midnight to find her way to us. We had hoped to have her with us for the evening, but for that to have worked out, we should have had casino night on Saturday instead of Friday. Nothing ever works out as you hope, eh? It seems she also had an interesting trip over, having passed by a strip club on her way to the casino, and they offered her $300 to strip for them [insert eye roll here]. 

Everyone else was quite wiped out so there was a world in which Mary skipped the casino altogether, but we decided that she came all this way, so I plopped myself into a second wind and went back down to the casino. There, Mary learned how to play 3-card poker, since all the Texas holdem tables were full. I did decently at roulette again, but lost my gains when they rolled the green 0, so we went back to the blackjack machines for me to spend my last $20 as I figured that was the only place where I might win my money back. As Mary was off picking up a drink, a guy sat down at the machine next to me and started grumbling to me about what a scam casinos are and gambling addictions and whatnot. I admitted that I had no idea what I was doing, so he said he’d give me 10 minutes of his time to teach me to blackjack properly. 

Now, this guy was pretty drunk and really wasn’t teaching me anything, he was telling me what to do, which wasn’t that helpful, all while saying that the machines are rigged, still repeating the same complaints about casinos over and over. We did get up to $80, but some bad luck dropped me down again and he decided to take over my machine and immediately won about $200. He then offered me a hundred bucks, since he “took the win from my machine” if I bought him a beer. I did, but he ended up losing the $800 he came in with, so never gave me my hundred—douche, haha. I didn’t really care though, the drink got rid of my stack of $1 bills. He left after that, and Mary returned… she had been held up in the drink line by some young guy who was celebrating his 21st birthday and taking up the whole drink line with his buddies in the process. 

Now I mentioned that I shouldn’t gamble because of my bad luck with dice and numbers, as Mary gave me much better advice on the blackjack game for a while. However, when I was down to my last $10, I doubled down on a 9+2 and drew a 2, so… bad luck wins again! After that we went back to the room and crashed out for the night. 

Jackie, Martie, Chrissy, & me

Stay tuned for part 3: post-AC!