The Borgata

The Borgata is a beautiful hotel. It is Las Vegas like. Unfortunately, it’s not in Las Vegas. Looking out my window, seeing the marshes surrounding Atlantic City and the gray, threatening skies, you know it can’t be Las Vegas.

Like the newest of the Vegas Strip hotels, The Borgata has a huge grand entrance. The lobby is bright and oversized, too. I’m surprised by how close the casino is to the common areas. I remember, in the original Atlantic City casino hotels, it was more segregated.

Unlike Nevada, in New Jersey minors cannot walk through the casino.

Our room is on the 35th floor with a view north toward Harrah’s, Trump Marina, and Brigantine. The room itself is very nice with two very comfortable beds. The bathroom has an oversized glass walled stall shower and nicely designed sink. The porcelain stuff is behind a door in a miniature room within the room – if you get my drift.

The common areas, like the hallways, are modern and bright in appearance. The elevator (at least yesterday) had one very strange quirk. At the rear of the car is a video screen. All day yesterday it was playing scenes from “Rear Window,” Hitchcock’s thriller with James Stewart.

We had dinner at Metropolitan, the 24/7 coffee shop. I had a very good, very large bowl of clam chowder. My Chicken Caesar wrap was dry. I didn’t think the actual wrap was particularly tasty.

Helaine and Steffie went to see Rick Springfield at the Music Box. They said his show was great – though they’ve never said otherwise, and probably never will. They were able to finagle their tickets to 2nd row, center.

While they watched, I played poker. Actually, I played twice – before and after dinner. In the early session, playing $6/$12 Hold’em, I won $96. After dinner I won $5. So far, so good.

The players seemed younger than any casino poker room I’d ever played in. This might be as much due to poker on TV than anything else, though I believe Borgata aims for a younger crowd.

The poker room, in a basement area, but nicely designed and appointed, was very computer dependent. That’s really unusual. The lists for each level of game were displayed on huge plasma screen TVs (and, unfortunately, plasma suffers from burn-in). The floor people walked around the room with some sort of wireless PDA and wireless microphones. On the corner of the podium where table sign ups took place were 4 802.11b antennas with the name TELEX in them.

As the night wore on, the disco upstairs opened. As soon as it did the poker room vibrated to the bass line from upstairs. It was really loud. But, other than that, the room was very nice with lots of drink service and decent action.

On a more somber note, while Helaine and Steffie went out for a while this early afternoon, I settled in and took a test in my Radar Meteorology class. Not the way I want to spend a vacation day, but you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do.