This final leg of our “Race for Rewards” required a bit of travel before we could travel. We reserved a four night charter booking through Casino’s International to Atlantic City. A charter flight is about the only way to get to Atlantic City from Oklahoma without flying to Philadelphia and renting a car so we elected to drive to Oklahoma City to catch the plane. The flight check-in was at 7 am so we drove down the night before and had a great dinner at Cattleman’s Steak House at the Oklahoma City Stockyards. Where better to find beef than at the Stockyards.
We arrived at Will Rogers World Airport at 6:30 am and waited for the charter service check-in. We quickly checked our bags and the next time we would see them would be in our room at Harrah’s Atlantic City. The Oklahoma City passengers filled about half of the 737. We took off from Oklahoma City and proceeded to Wichita for the remainder of the passengers. After a twenty-five minute flight and quick loading we took off for the three hour flight to Atlantic City.
There were thunderstorms on the east coast and it was a very rough flight. It wasn’t an easy landing but the pilot did and excellent job and received a round of applause from a very nervous group of passengers.
We exited the terminal and loaded on to the waiting buses for the twenty minute ride to the hotel. We entered the Brigantine entrance and received our room keys from our hosts. We proceeded to the Waterfront Tower and went up to the 18th floor with a beautiful view. We had a wonderful room overlooking the bay. We freshened up and went downstairs to opt-in for our last checkpoints.
It didn’t take anytime to accumulate the necessary tier points. Using VPFree we found some full pay JOB and DDB machines to help us keep solvent the next four days.
Everyday we took the jitney down to the boardwalk and had a really nice trip. There are three more Caesars properties on the boardwalk; Caesars, Bally’s, and Showboat, this gave us a lot of places to bump up our tier levels for the year. Bally’s was the location with the greatest number of full pay machines and they did pay off. We also enjoyed The Showboat and met Chuck, a bartender by the poker room. He too was former military so we had an interesting visit with him several days. While sitting at his bar we met up with a couple who were also finishing up the Great Race, Robert and Lou. They are from the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania. They travel the country and have visited many of the Caesars Properties. Across the bar was a couple also working on their Great Race. It was really strange to meet so many folks with the same objective at such a little bar at the far end of the boardwalk.
Atlantic City is a great place to visit and we really enjoyed our trip. The flight back to Oklahoma City was uneventful as was our hour drive back home. We completed our Race and will receive the maximum credit for our efforts.
Was it all worth it and would we do it again? The answer is explained in the conclusion found here.