I got to try my first isom last week and here’s my [long] impression:
I was in Las Vegas last Thursday for some dental work. My dentist is in Oceanside, but is getting certified for cosmetic dental restorations at an advanced institute in LV. For a big discount on the fees, I agreed to be his test patient for 3 molars. So I was in the dentist chair with people all crowded around me for 4 hours on Thursday morning.
According to my pre-arranged plan, I went back to the hotel room and grabbed a Monte Cristo (#3, I believe) to smoke while I soaked in the jacuzzi and let the feeling come back to my jaw. I pre-punched the cigar so I wouldn’t have to mess with that at the pool and just took my bic and the cigar.
As I got off the elevator at the 6th floor of the Stratosphere, there was a sign saying “pool closed.” I went out there anyway and found the towel booth open and manned. The guy there said the pool had been closed due to wind, but since it just died down, the pool was open. There was NOBODY else there but my wife and me, the lifeguard and the towel man.
I grabbed an ashtray and asked the lifeguard if it was OK to smoke a cigar in the hot tub (hey, I’m from California…it’s not OK to smoke a cigar ANYWHERE here). She said fine so I got in up to my neck. I looked at my hands under the water and though “Bad Idea.” I gingerly picked up the cigar at the band with a wet hand and lit it without any problem.
Soaking in a hot tub and smoking a cigar is not as easy as I’d imagined. If you hunker down up to your neck, you have to hold your hand over your head. I didn’t have the time to find a really comfortable position, because about the time the entire end came to ash the bubbles stopped. I hopped out to find the switch, but the lifeguard came over to tell me the tub was closed!! It was a cr@ppy little pool and tub anyway. The casinos don’t make any money on guests who are at the pool, so most of these resorts seem to consider the pool an unpleasant necessity unworthy of style or class.
So I toweled and we headed off with me keenly aware that my first Habana cigar was burning down and I had no definite place to smoke it yet!
I took it onto the elevator with some trepidation and went down to the casino level. There we found a lounge with the Angels game on the big screen. My wife and I are big Angels fans, so we pulled up at a booth and were the only guests in the lounge. I finished the cigar while drinking an overpriced Perrier & twist and listening to my wife cough periodically to make sure I knew that she dislikes cigar smoke.
The Cigar: My first few puffs gave my tongue a biting, peppery sensation that I have found pretty common among premium cigars, but is not my preferred taste. But this disappeared in a very short time (about the time I left the pool). It mellowed into a complex and pleasant taste. I have heard some isom’s compared to chocolate shakes and thought “that’s absurd!” but it really is not too far from that. Not as sweet, but full and complex like good chocolate. Most cigars get stronger as you go, but this Monte seemed just the opposite. Now, this taste did not slap me upside the head and shout “this is the best cigar you have ever smoked,” but it was mellow, tasty and pleasant.
If I had stayed in the lounge, I would never have known how powerful this little smoke is. My wife and I got up to leave as soon as I nubbed it, and I noticed on the way out an unfamiliar vertigo-like feeling. “Now I know why people like Cubans so much” because this packed a wallop.
Because my schedule was set before I even knew about the LVCS, I didn’t make it to the big show. Because my wife was with me, I didn’t even make it to the pre-show festivities, so I missed all the herfers there. But maybe next time. I’m saving my Sig VI for that.
