Aquarius Mystery Cache

I was in Las Vegas one day with my wife and kids. We left Vegas to go over Hoover Dam, except once we got to within two miles of Hoover Dam, we were told that the road was closed due to construction because of 9/11 security issues. If we came back the next day, we would be able to see Hoover Dam. Well, we were on a tight time schedule, so we didn't camp out for the return trip. Instead, we went south then east to the city of Laughlin. We showed up at night and saw that the area was thick with casino marketing. We found a hotel not too far off the path where we would stay and head out in the morning. It was a place called the Aquarius. (Now I have that 1979 song playing in my head again.) I parked the car in the parking garage and told my family that I would go in and make arrangements for the stay and then come back so we could all go in together carrying all of our stuff (and it was a lot of stuff).

I walked into the lobby on the way to the front desks and saw all of the slot machines; the Aquarius was decked out with fancy dancing lights and gambling machines from wall to wall. When I asked the gentleman behind the desk about the cost of getting rooms, he told me something like 79 and 9-99.

I wasn't sure what he was talking about, so I calmly asked him, "How much for one night? A thousand dollars?" I had no idea what kind of a place this was. It was so much fancier than any other place we had stayed, and we had been to lots of places on our tour of the western half of the United States. I knew that he didn't mean 9 dollars and 99 cents, so I was trying to get clarification. I figured that if he was asking for nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars for a room, I would kindly ask where the nearest roach motel was and take my family to somewhere more affordable.

I couldn't have been more wrong. My demeanor is always to remain calm when others would otherwise blow their tops, so he was very surprised to hear that I misunderstood him and that I "nonchalontly" was ready to pay a thousand dollars for a room. No, instead, the max charge was 99 dollars for a luxury suite, almost 100 dollars, not almost 1000 dollars! When he said 9-99, he had just stuttered a bit and said too many nines. This was a place that catered to gamblers. The stay was cheap so that they could get all your money from gambling it away. So now I was being treated as if I had too much money and was going to offer everyone big tips.

Another thing that he didn't know was that I was paying about 100 dollars for each night that we stayed at a hotel. Sometimes it was a little less than 100 dollars, but most of the time it was around 130 dollars a night for generic hotel rooms. So when he said it was just 100 dollars for the luxury suite, I saw a really good bargain.

Since he thought I was filthy rich, he wanted to "set me up right." I asked if he had anything available on the top floor. He said "no" at first, but then made some tweaks here and there and came up with a room available on the 18th floor, the top floor of the Aquarius. What a bargain. He offered to help me take my things up. I noticed that he didn't do that for other customers; he told some "doorman-looking type guy" to take care of the previous customer. He was some kind of manager but he was offering to follow me out with a cart to load up all my luggage. How impressive. I politely told him that I didn't need any help and thanked him for the offer.

I went back and told my family what happened. Awesome! Top floor; also awesome! We stayed in the suite that had separate rooms for a full kitchen, living room with couches, decked-out master bedroom, a gigantic bathroom, and awesome views (note: plural) from the 18th floor through windows that were so large that they took up the entire wall where they were.

We never did spend any money on the gambling downstairs. The Aquarius was the best hotel stay on the whole tour.

To get coordinates to the geocache and find this one, you must add one minute to EITHER the latitude OR the longitude of the posted coordinates, but not to both of them. Which one? Hmmm.

A word of caution with puzzle-caches. When posting your log, do not include spoiler answers in your log, lest you risk the unfortunate deletion of your valuable log. It is such a sad tragedy when an inappropriate log brings upon the inevitable destruction of itself.

You are looking for a black ammo box with a cantuland-geocache-logo painted on the sides. Original contents include a Guide to Geocaching, a Sacagawea gold dollar coin, a Kansas quarter, a Lewis-and-Clark edition nickel, one of those new-Lincoln-image-on-the-back pennies, an old wheat penny, and lots of other miscellaneous trade items.

Congratulations to both frog4peace and crossmage for being First To Find!

See waypoint GCPQF4 for the next Heartland Geocache.

REMEMBER: Make the fair trade. Log your visit. Leave the site better than you found it. Protect the environment — always. Educate those around you. Find another cache! Good luck, and may all your cache dreams come true. —cantuland