…and the bullet points just keep on rolling!

• In addition to the ticket arcade, we found something else to spend obscene amounts of money on: dinner.

• The resort is peppered with advertisements down every hallway. Quite a few of them were for one of the in-house restaurants, Karl's Steak House. There are only so many times I can see those ads before I start thinking that food is the most delicious looking food in the history of the world.

• Karl's Steak House doesn't look like a terribly upscale place, but they sure as fuck are priced like one. The really cheap steaks were over $30 dollars and prices trended up over $100. For a steak. I know these prices aren't unheard of, but this is just not what we were expecting.

• The Bunny ordered… uh, pasta I think (shut up, it's been two weeks), The Chicken ordered… uh, something else and I ordered the Giant Mashed Potatoes.

• I highly recommend those potatoes. It's a big-ass mound of home made potatoes roughly the size of my head (literally), laced with butter and smothered in sour cream, thick cut bacon chunks and melted cheddar. Holy fuck, was it good. And filling. I ate less than half of it, then ate more for breakfast the next day and still had leftovers go to waste.

• Another bright spot on the restaurant experience was the wine list. The crown jewel of their list was an 18 liter bottle of cabernet sauvignon. 18 liters. I wanted it so badly, but not badly enough to pay $1300 for it. That price does not include a team of Sherpas to lug it around for you.

• At first I wanted the ginormous bottle of wine for myself, but Bunny had a much better idea — Christmas gift for my boss's wife and office manager Bird, a real wine enthusiast. Bunny's idea was to give her that bottle and a crazy straw and watch her go.

• After squeaking out of the restaurant with our nest egg intact (current nest egg balance: $8.12, two old buttons, one dull washer that looks like a dime), we returned to our condo for one of my favorite parts of any hotel stay: real cable television.

• After a very long drought, we now have cable TV at home again. But we have a super cheap package, which we only ordered because it was free at first. We get eight or nine channels, and none of them are terribly exciting.

• Whenever we're at a hotel, I'd like nothing more than to kick back with my feet up and the History Channel on continuously. I loves me some History. I watched a show on chocolate production, another on the machines of execution, another on the underworld beneath Paris (huge, cavernous rooms filled with bones) and the most unexpectedly cool show ever… "Ice Road Truckers."

• I've known for quite some time that Canada has a huge diamond mine up north somewhere. I had no idea how far north it was. The mine operates year round, and has it's own airstrip for deliveries of fresh food, medicine and emergency flights out. Very heavy equipment can't be flown in, it has to be driven in. The catch is that there's no road.

• The "road" from Yellowknife to the mine is hundreds of kilometers long and only 20% of it is overland. The rest is over water. The ice is only thick enough for heavy trucks for about eight or ten weeks a year. That's the premise of the show: reality TV about truckers making a mad dash over sheet ice in near-arctic conditions and complete isolation to get a year's worth of heavy equipment to the mine in two months. The show is oddly captivating.

• Later on, my brother-in-law and I decided on some hops- and barley-based lubrication to smooth over the stresses of howling children in close quarters. Which I'm totally exaggerating. There was very little howling, the quarters weren't that close, and we weren't that much in need. But, hey… it's beer!

• The beers were mostly uneventful. The most noteworthy thing was our tentative plan to move the next night's required drinking (because the drinking is required, believe me) to… the boobie bar!

• Tourist Trap has an abundance of gentlemen's establishments, which makes sense given the general "give me all your fucking money" motif established by the rest of the community. The only thing lacking is casinos. Oh, wait… the Trap has those too.

 
Tune in next time for even less inspiring events! (The excitement keeps building, I know!)