Homeless in Las Vegas

So my trip to Vegas was good. Not much to write about, except, MY HOTEL CAUGHT ON FIRE! And I was homeless in Las Vegas. Well, for a few hours, anyway.

This is what happened: I was at the trade show for it's final day when I received a phone call from my boss letting me know that the Monte Carlo, the hotel at which I was residing, had caught fire and was being evacuated and had I heard from Dave? This was at about 10:30am. I tried calling Dave, who was still at the hotel. No answer. I tried again for several minutes with the same result. Eventually he called from a pay phone to let me know he was okay. He had been out for a quick run before he was to head over to the convention center to help us tear down the booth. He was told about the fire on his way back from his run. Since they were already in the process of evacuating the hotel, Dave was forced to stay in his stinky running clothes and head over to the convention center without the tools we needed to tear down and with only $20 for the cab fare.

We finished up the show and got the booth all packed up and finally headed toward the Monte Carlo at about 4:30pm. They weren't letting anybody in the hotel, telling us to head to the MGM for more info. We arrived at the MGM Garden Arena, only to be given a hotline number to call for updates. They put us on shuttle buses and distributed us around to the various MGM Mirage owned properties. Dave and I ended up at Mandalay Bay, which was actually a pretty nice upgrade from the Monte Carlo. But we still didn't have any of our stuff.

I kept calling the hotline and they finally let us back into the Monte Carlo to retrieve our stuff around 9:30pm. We were escorted to our room and had to fill out a form indicating whether or not anything had been damaged. Luckily, our room was on the 15th floor, far away from where the fire started. Our floor smelled like smoke, but that was it.

All in all, we were pretty lucky. My coworker was on the 17th floor, where there was a bit of water and smoke damage, but his stuff was fine. Floors 26 and up were still closed when we were there retrieving our belongings.

I will say that the Monte Carlo did a great job organizing our distribution to other hotels and also the retrieval of our stuff. The whole thing could have been a lot more chaotic and it really wasn't more than an inconvenience.

It is good to be home. Though I would have paid good money to have been able to keep that bed in Mandalay Bay...it was SO COMFY!! Totally made the whole moving-to-another-hotel-because-mine-caught-fire worth it in my book!