Sunday afternoon, sitting through my 16^th hour of watching football in the Mandalay Bay sportsbook my throat started to get scratchy. I wasn’t sure if I was feeling the onset of swine flu, a minor cold or the aftereffects of sleeping 5 hours a night and inhaling approximately 4,279 cigarettes worth of second hand smoke since arriving on Friday.

After a rest day on Monday, I awoke yesterday and still felt like I had been beaten about the head all weekend by Manny Pacquiao. No matter what the biological reason for this feeling – it can only be known as one thing – the Vegas Flu.

As a wise woman once said – back to life, back to reality. It is hard to come back from Vegas. After spending roughly 60 straight hours focused solely on either making money or not losing any more money while never once actually seeing the daylight, coming back to work can be a serious letdown.

As Shadow said in an email yesterday: “I miss Vegas. And Manute Bol is still F*ing purple” (an inside joke and what I am absolutely getting Bill Simmons to sign in my copy of The Book of Basketball on Friday). Add in the aftereffects of no sleep, a horrendous diet, too much alcohol and the steady stream of second-hand smoke and you invariably feel wiped out physically and mentally.

 But that doesn’t mean I didn’t have a blast while there. Therefore below I present the highlights of our trip to Vegas. Turner and Shadow can add anything I may have missed as when I went back last night to find some of the notes I scribbled on a hotel notepad I couldn’t find them.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a trip to Vegas if you didn’t have at least one casualty. On to The Hierarchy of Hate Vegas Road Trip – Fall ’09 edition.

As a frequent flyer I have many pet peeves related to travel – for example: people getting on planes and bringing absolutely nothing to do (You know for a fact you are sitting in a chair for the next two hours, a portion of which you can’t even use electronics, and you bring nothing to do? That is quite a monument to your lack of intelligence and foresight – spend 50 cents and buy a paper!) – but flying to Vegas is a unique experience. Is there any other flight more full of people with limited flying experience than a trip to Vegas? Ok, maybe a flight to Orlando but that is it. All of this is a long way of saying that when the guys sitting next to Turner and I showed up in matching Hawaiian shirts, we shouldn’t have been surprised.

Our trip started on Friday with lunch at Tacos and Tequila where we learned that ‘no two tacos are the same’. It was then followed by our blackjack dealer Kathleen telling us that one of her rules of play is to ‘whack it till it’s hard’. Let’s just say that Vegas has never met a double-entendre it didn’t like.

Speaking of Kathleen, if you ever wondered what Turner is like to gamble with, I will just say this. After Turner lost his stack to Kathleen and wandered off, she actually asked Shadow and I to buy him dinner. Yes, a Vegas dealer was concerned about Turner after she took his money. This either speaks to his incredible charm or devastation upon losing money. I will leave it to you to decide which.

Kathleen also asked us if we knew about the strippermobile. Umm…no we do not, can you elaborate? Apparently there was a story running around town about a truck like vehicle with a see-through back that enclosed two strippers – acting as an ad for a strip joint. Upon coming home, one quick Google search confirmed the story. Which begs the question – how does the club staff the truck? Do they pick their 2 best looking women? If so, are the women happy to miss out on an evening’s tips? Do people show up disappointed by the other ladies? So many questions.

During our last trip to Vegas, whenever I was in a cold streak of hands I would change up my bet – so if at a $10 table, I would throw $15 or $20 for a hand or two to change the momentum. This trip we christened this move the Sproles – after back-up Chargers running back Darren Sproles. This had lots of benefits as we could confidently announce “I’m going Sproles”, to the delight of the other two and the confusion of everyone else at the table. There are also the variations. A move to a $25 chip became the Jacob Hester. When I went to an almost exclusive $15 betting strategy at a $10 table, I told Turner I had ‘benched LT’. If this can become a standard phrase and philosophy I consider my work here done.

On second thought though maybe we should have labeled this the Chester Taylor. Then when we leave a table where we are doing poorly and try our luck at a new table we could say we are pulling a Favre.

Friday night we walked over to the MGM Grand to watch the Nuggets / Lakers game (which required crossing a pedestrian bridge over the strip). I am 94% convinced Shadow only wanted to go to MGM Grand to try and catch sight of the strippermobile while walking over the Strip.

We then went up the road to the Hooters casino. I like to believe we did this only as a sociological experiment. Hooters is like….well a Hooters with gambling tables. It is fascinating to see the demographic change from Mandalay and MGM Grand to Hooters. We went from a combination of moneyed older folks, a smattering of tourists and LA club kids to a fraternity house.

At Hooters, Shadow and sat at a single deck blackjack table where our dealer was named Ashli – yes with an I.  I put the over/under on the chance she dots that I with a heart at 100%. I would take the over.

The majority of the weekend was spent losing money in the sportsbook. This was our first time trying to watch a whole slate of games at a sportsbook and I would like to make a suggestion for any virgins planning a Vegas football weekend. Trying to watch approximately 10 games is overwhelming. Pick one game and focus on it. Only change your attention during commercials. Trying to track all of the actions on all the screens will leave you not seeing any of it.

It wouldn’t be a post without my, at least briefly, discussing FSU. They were an early game on Saturday (starting at an ungodly 9 am Vegas time) and on Friday I couldn’t tell Turner and Shadow enough that picking Wake to beat FSU was a lock on par with my correct pick of Nuggets over Lakers. I mean – the pathetic FSU defense and a freshman QB getting his first start on the road versus a team that had beaten FSU three straight years? It was a gimme right? Oh well, I have never been happier to be completely wrong about a game. Maybe it takes me laying money against FSU for them to come through. If this is true, I should get back to Vegas to put some money on the Gators before the FSU/UF game in a couple weeks. Anyone want to donate to the cause?

Speaking of UF, my other highlight of Saturday was cheering and betting against them. Although after South Carolina came out with the core values of the military in place of names and a small section of camo on their jerseys  in honor of Veteran’s Day – how could anyone cheer against them? Why doesn’t Fox News get on this – spend a little less time worried about where Obama was born because there is nothing more unpatriotic than cheering for UF.

While I was enjoying winning money against UF, Shadow was dying a slow death for the Iowa/ Ohio State Rose Bowl playoff game. To get so close with an untested freshman QB in the Shoe was a great testament to Iowa. Though that didn’t stop Shadow from taking a little walkabout after the disappointing OT was completed. I can’t blame him. My team had won and even I was going cross-eyed after watching all of those screens for at least eight hours. Losing money the whole time.

But whenever we started feeling guilty about the money we were losing we only had to remember the kid that dropped $4000 at a blackjack table and another guy who stood in front of Turner dropped $5000 on the Broncos.

If I have the Vegas Flu this week, those guys must have the Vegas Plague.