$500 Vegas Tax

Firstly, Thank You to everyone who called or wrote after the passing of my grandmother. The outpouring of caring was awesome. I'm blessed to have so many good friends in this life. You guys rock.

Now onto the title of this entry, the dreaded Vegas Tax. So it seems that I simply cannot make a trip to Vegas without $500 disappearing from my account in one fashion or another, take this past weekend. My good friend Ryan works for Caterpillar designing very big trucks, earthmovers really, crazy giant yellow earth devouring monstrosities. Caterpillar held an international sales and tech conference in Vegas this week. Since I didn't get to see him very much last time I was home, I told him I'd come spend some time while he was out this way. Saturday, he got in and had some time off from their busy schedule, so I rolled over first thing in the morning to pick him up when his flight landed. I got up, had a leisurely coffee, hopped in the golf cart Prius and cruised over, no problems, great weather, easy drive, not much traffic. I guess I should have known something bad was going to happen. Anyway, I hit Bass Pro Shop in LV to watch the big fish swim for a little bit then cruised over to the airport. LV is made for car drivers. I parked in the short term parking, about 200' from the terminal entrance and headed in, checked the baggage monitors and found his carosel. I sat down, waited about 10 minutes and here he came, bags already in tow, with his work buddy Rod, who was going to be working the show as well. We cruised out to the car and headed towards Caesars. I hopped on the wrong ramp on the way out of parking, so we ended up going to the far south end of town, which was fine since we would just be cruising the strip.  There was quite a bit of congestion on teh strip but we made the best of it, joking back and forth about the sign trucks and people walking around. We even ran into a line of convertible mustangs, like 50+ of them. I rolled down the window and asked what the deal was and the nice ladies in the mustang next too us explained that they were part of a tupperware contingent from Germany. No shit. You can't make this stuff up. Cool. We worked our way down and turned into the self parking garage for Caesars, turned up the first ramp, Rod asked if i had bought the Priuws new, I said no, it was used and blackout. The damn thing died on the ramp into the first level of the garage. All the lights still worked but the system would not turn on. Just dead. The Prius is computer controlled, almost everything relies on the CPU to work, even the transmission. So with it dead, there was no way to put it in neutral, no way to push it, roll it, or carry it, well not with just three of us, to get it out of the way. So there it sat with flashers on with a steady stream of casino staff and hopeful gamblers flying by with confused and oftentimes annoyed looks on their faces. The CAT engineers quickly assessed a blown fuse to the CPU, we tried a spare and it blew too. Great!! We decided there was little we could accomplish, technology being so esoteric as it is, and I decided to call AAA. The boys headed into Caesars to check in and I waited on my tow truck, which took about an hour. The driver, Daniel, was a real nice guy and we were out of there in maybe 10 minutes and headed to the dealer. Once at the the dealer it took 20 minutes to diagnose, 45 minutes to fix and 30 minutes to wash. Verdict. A secondary cooling pump had failed, pretty common apparantly. This particular pump cools the inverter that provides power to the cpu and keeps both cool, so its a big deal, about $500 worth of big deal. Ugh!! Vegas Tax strikes again.