Three Rights Make a Left

I have been blessed to have seen and done a lot of things in my sixty four years. I’ve mentioned before that I have been to every state except North Dakota as well as a dozen or so countries. Sometimes my memory of places I’ve been and things I have done get a little confused. The past couple of weeks I talked about the tree I found on our property that I call the “Merlin Tree” and the email I sent to Disney to tell them about it. I talked about a distinct memory of being at Disneyland and remembering Merlin’s Castle there, although I couldn’t find any history of there being a Merlin’s Castle there. Then, a couple of days after it was too late to correct my column, it occurred to me where that memory came from.

It was about 1997. Since Lori had to travel a lot with her work we had made the decision to homeschool our three kids who were aged 12, 11 and 9. I had received a bachelor’s degree in Education a few years earlier and it turned out to be a pretty good decision to use my degree to teach my own kids after teaching a few years at Terrell Christian High School and Eastfield College.

We literally traveled all over the country and stopped at countless historical places. One particular trip Lori had to attend a work related conference in Las Vegas for a week.

We stayed at the old Tropicana Hotel on the end of the strip toward the Airport. Las Vegas was a lot different in those days and some of the newer hotels were under construction.

I have no idea if they still do it now, but back then in the late afternoon after Lori got off work, we would walk along the strip. Casino employees would gather at the entrances along the street and give away SWAG (and acronym for Stuff We All Get) like fanny packs, hats buttons, things that the kids loved getting. I remember at one casino they gave away a free spin on a big slot machine near the casino entrance. Since it was free, Lori and I both took a spin. When we were done, we noticed that one of our kids (I won’t say who) was very upset and crying. We both got on our knees and asked: “What’s wrong?” Through tears our little child said: “I don’t like y’all gambling.” We explained that since we weren’t paying anything, we weren’t gambling but we took the point and didn’t do it again.

For the rest of the week we walked a lot and I discovered an activity for our kids to do while their mom worked.

There were a couple of brand-new hotels across the street from ours: The Luxor which we thoroughly enjoyed exploring. Anything in air conditioning was a welcome retreat from the heat that got so hot I literally burned my hand on the car door.

The other thing our kids loved was in the basement of the brand-new Excalibur hotel across Las Vegas Boulevard from our hotel. There we found carnival games, which was something they were used to from Six Flags and The Texas State Fair back home. Only these carnival games were pretty much slanted in your favor instead of against you. It was pretty easy to win a huge Dragon or giant Wizard…Merlin the Wizard as a matter of fact. We won so many of them we could barely get them in the van for the trip home.

The thing I remembered about that trip is the first time we stopped on the pedestrian bridge between our hotel and Excalibur was one of our kids pointing to a colorful lighted character looking out of a castle tower at the very top of Excalibur and exclaiming: “Look; it’s Merlin’s Castle.”

So what I was remembering was not a castle at Disneyland….It was the Excalibur Hotel in Las Vegas.