Rambling Wanderer

2012 already! I am so excited about this year. It is almost the end of January and so far most of my traveling has been to La Grande and back (36 miles round trip), but we have managed to make a couple trips over the mountains to the more populated portion of northeast Oregon.
Last weekend we went to Wildhorse Resort. I had won $100 of free play in a birthday card they sent me, so we were off and running. We even had a $50 credit at the Arrowhead Truck Stop, so we were able to fill our tank with gas once we got there. We ate at McDonalds, just because it sounded good at 9 o'clock at night. I mean, who doesn't love McDonald's french fries for a late night snack? Our entire trip cost us $10, so we were feeling pretty lucky, we just knew this would be the night when we would walk out of the casino with thousands of dollars in winnings. We had already told our daughter we probably wouldn't come home that night, because we were going to just get a room with all the cash we planned to win.
Well, it didn't quite turn out like that afterall, and I blame it all on my one crazy mistake. It threw my whole night off and I just wasn't able to get myself into a winning vibe again.
My plan was to go to a machine, punch in my card code so I could play $50 of my free money. I was going to spin the wheels once, then cash out my ticket, so I could have $50 and my husband could have $50. I walked up to the first machine I saw. It was a $1 machine.....I don't play $1 machines, I play penny machines, but I knew it was just one pull and who knows, I might of gotten lucky, but I didn't.
My husband said, "Hey, that's a dollar machine." "I know," I replied, acting like I knew exactly what I was doing, only I didn't. I pulled the handle, I didn't win. No problem, it was just one dollar and it was free, so I pressed the 'cash out' button and waited for my ticket to pop out, it didn't. A man walking by pointed at the screen and said, "You have to play this machine. You can't just cash it out when it is their money you are playing on, you just have to keep playing? And you better play $3 at a time, because see, you would have won here, but you only played one dollar."
Turns out I would have won about $45 on that one pull alone.
My heart sank. I did not want to play a dollar machine, I wanted to play a penny machine, where I could sit for a really long time betting thirty cents at a time. Grrrrrr, I was so mad at myself.
Of course there was that same guy, who kept wandering around behind us, saying I'm going to be right here when you win big. Which to me is no big deal, but I could tell my husband was getting a little irratated. Not only did he see his night of fun fading quickly away at $3 a pull, but this guy kept hanging around his wife.
Finally I won a couple rounds and we were able to cash out $24, so I only actually spent $26 at the dollar machine, but boy did I learn my leason. Don't put your money in a dollar machine unless you want to play a dollar machine.
The rest of the evening we had fun, but I think I threw our whole night out of wack with my hastiness to get started playing slot machines. Live and learn and journey on.