Last weekend I finally made the inagural trip to the AC. Unfortunately my timing wasn’t spectacular because my ATM card had just expired and the new one the bank sent me didn’t work. If that’s not bad enough, my bank (a local bank in Austin) was closed due to Austin Blizzard 2007!, which meant I had no hope of getting my ATM card running in a reasonable amount of time. Instead I had to get an ATM card for the new account that Kat set up here.

All I had to do was go to the bank, present an ID and pick up a new ATM card. Easy enough. What was strange was the guy who took care of it for me. He looked at my driver’s license and said, “This is really you? It doesn’t even look like you.” Then he gave me my new ATM card and watched me take money out of the ATM to make sure it worked. I feel safe already.

Cash in hand, I made my way to Port Authority to catch the Greyhound to AC. The trip was rather uneventful and my bus contained a much smaller number of serial killers than I would have expected after my Greyhound trip to Foxwoods. AC reminds me a lot of Reno, only with more active development going on. It’s a smaller, more ghetto version of Vegas. The big difference at AC was that all the games were more expensive. You’re not going to find a table game for less than $25/hand, and I felt lucky to find a craps table that was running at a measley $10 minimum.

I had gone to AC fully intent on playing some poker, but as with all recent trips to the casino, I had a hard time pulling myself away from the craps table for long enough to find a poker room. And by “hard time” I mean “found it impossible”. That’s ok though. Now that I’ve been there and checked out the scene, I’ll be going back somewhat regularly. In fact, I’m about to leave to go there now.

There was one eventful moment on my way out. As I was waiting to catch the bus back to NYC, a homeless lady tried a new begging method that I hadn’t seen before. She walked up to me and said, “Hey, I bet you don’t have any money for me, do you?” Wow. She’s like some kind of genius. I bet her next line was going to be “I bet you are more disgusted by my smell than my looks.” Good show, good show.