Our Greektown adventure

Good morning.
For Craig's birthday, I booked a room at the new Greektown Casino Hotel that opened this past Feb. A trip we almost had to cancel. Read the past post about that.
Here's Craig in our room.

We booked a corner room since they have floor to ceiling windows. As you can see behind Craig, the only view we have there was the 14 story hotel parking ramp. We were on the 12th floor. You can't request a specific floor and the hotel was booked That surprised us since it was a Sunday, and it was right after New Years. But we soon found out why. We are only 5 blocks from Ford Field, where the Detroit Lions play football. It was a home game that Sunday with the Chicago Bears. Our hotel was full of Chicago fans going to the game. But it was okay. It still let in a lot of light, and we weren't planing on spending a lot of time in the room anyway. You can see the rest of the room here.

Here's a couple of pics of the view. Top pic, right behind the church steeple is the Renaissance Center and GM's world headquarters. And below, the Detroit river just south of downtown.

We arrived in Detroit around 1pm. Since we couldn't check in to our room until 4ish, we stopped at the Motor City Casino on the way in. Detroit has 3 casinos. in 3 different parts of town. After a couple of hours with little luck, we headed to our hotel. Checked in and decide to get a late lunch. We headed out into the neighborhood. Our hotel was right on the edge of the neighborhood. Greektown is an old area of the city, just to the east of the downtown business district. It's actually only a couple of blocks long, but with some great Greek food. We stopped at a place called the Golden Fleece. A small narrow restaurant with really good food.We started with the famous flaming cheese. I'm not sure what type of cheese it was, but they bring it to the table, pour brandy over it and light it. when the flames die out you have a wonderful crusty warm cheese you can eat with bread. Then of course we had the Lamb Gyros.
You can almost see Craig thinking, "you always have to take of pic of me eating don't you",

They were delicious! Here's a pic of the main street through Greektown.

The casino is behind the fake facade of the building on the near left of the pic. It wraps around behind the entire block. So after food, we headed into the casino where we did pretty good. Completely lost track of time and when we finally left around 9pm, we still had over half the money we brought to gamble with. Hours of entertainment for pretty cheap. Well back to the hotel for a little room service and TV before turning in. Craig wanted pizza, and the pizza they had on the room service menu was $15 for an 8in. Ridiculous! I said there's a pizza place right in Greektown. I found the number and ordered him his peperoni and mushroom pizza. By time I got out of the hotel and down the block to Pizza Papalis, it was ready. Brought it back and was that some good pizza! A bit spicier than we like, but that didn't stop us!

The next morning it was back to Lansing. It had snowed about an inch during the night, so the roads were messy, and it was slow going. We saw around 5 cars in ditches. People need to take it easy in this kind of weather. But we made it home safe, and Craig had a good time and was happy I made him go. And him having a nice birthday, that made me happy.