Some accounting for the trip:
I ended up +3.6k.
Poker was +4.2, which means that I lost about 600 between sports betting and table games. I think the loss was almost entirely blackjack. I should probably not play blackjack.

Some thoughts:
Very surprisingly, I went 6/6 on my poker sessions with no big wins at all. I tend to play a pretty volatile style, especially in limit, so the relatively smooth sailing was a pleasant surprise.
Within these sessions, I played 5/10 twice at Aria, 5/10 twice at Bellagio, 40/80 twice at Bellagio, and 1/2 twice at the Golden Nugget. The only lineup where I'm not confident I was winning was the first 5/10 at Bellagio, and the remainder of the games were markedly easy. And even in the first Bellagio game, I managed to play a 4k pot with KK vs 93o, so that's gotta be indicative of something. I know the Aria 5/10 has a tough reputation and I barely play no limit, so I guess that I must have just timed things really well.

The 40/80 at Bellagio is an incredibly good game. I saw some truly awful play from regs with lots of money. For instance this was a hand that I played against a 10/20nl reg who was playing with 4 flags on the table: I open k9cc utg 7-max. He 3! bb. I call. Flop=779. He bets, I raise, He 3-bets, I call. Turn 4. He bets. I call. River x. He bets, I call. He has AQhh. Lol, what? This is neither the time nor place for poker strategy, but that's a lot of questionable decisions right there. And this is the dude projecting how good/big time he is at poker.

The 3am door lock fiasco triggered some PTSD in me from a trip to the Rio a few years ago. Long story short, only took about 20 minutes for engineering to arrive, another 2 minutes to get in the room, then an hour+ to change the lock. After 2x round trip front-desk to Carnival tower room (like a mile+ each way?), at 2am.

Where's that Prime Rib from? I'd eat it.

The prime rib is from the cafe at Downtown Grand. You can get a coupon from the kiosk so that it's $8.50 if you gamble a little. I think it's like $19 or so otherwise.

Good stuff man, loved the pics@!

I actually really enjoyed it. There's a side entry with a barrel where you ring a bell and say a password, which can be found on instagram/their website. Inside it's a bar with some exhibits of assorted prohibition stuff. There's also a really cool fish tank in the hallway by the bathrooms.

Very nice pics. Was the fancy meal pics Partage?

Any pics of the Mob Museum speakeasy?

Sounds great, I'll add it to the list.

Tx for the photos and I'm glad you ran good!

Thanks for the TR!

Last night, I was clicking around on PokerGo and saw a picture of my opponent in this hand. It turns out he's a rich amateur who appeared on a recent episode of Poker After Dark. Neat. It kind of explains how he could sit with 20k and not have a basic of sense of fixed-limit strategy.

I’ve enjoyed your dope trip reports through the years.

Fascinating how your early ones were so low budget and now you are playing some pretty decent stakes.

Is the big increase in stakes due to your job situation or just your poker improvement?

Definitely not job related. I don't even have one at the moment. I guess it's poker improvement.

Since this made me introspective, here's some thoughts:

I'm comfortable at the stakes (games where you buy in for ~3k) and am a decent winner over a medium sample (over 2400 hrs in the past two years, including almost 1000hrs of 40/80 in the last year, which is the bulk of my play).

For no limit, I think I'm generally pretty good at detaching myself from the money, thinking through spots quickly, and executing/not worrying too much about being wrong. I posted one "punt" where I stacked off $1500 on the turn out of the big blind with 88 on 7x4c2cT, but I also successfully called off a $600 pot-sized river bluff with A6 on KQ6K3 because villain's line made no sense and jammed T8hh through on the river on QJh47hA in a 3-way pot (of about $1500) after raising big on turn in a single-raised 3-way pot. I feel like if I posted any of these hands in LLSNL or a similar forum, people would think (and/or tell me) I'm terrible. I probably am, but--given what I saw in the Bellagio and Aria games--a lot of other people suck at poker too, and I'm willing to go for spots.

And for limit, I guess that I'm a decent reg at this point. I've run a lot of head up spots (mostly using cepheus solutions) and have a decent sense of what to value bet/raise and how to find bluffs. And I'm more willing to deviate than a lot of nitty pros, which has served me pretty well. I imagine I could get to the same place in NL, were I willing to put in the work.