Friday, July 23rd

Today was Casino and Comedy Day.

In the morning, we headed back to Parc Jean Drapeau to hit the casino. We were having an OK time, but had lost quite a bit of money on slots. Finally, we found 3 machines next to each other in a part of the casino that wasn't very crowded. These machines had a feature called Key Boxes. If you drew a Key Box, the machine boomed "You have won 1 extra key!" You could redeem the key box and win a random amount of coins, or you could save the key and hope to redeem 2 key boxes at the same time, for higher random amounts. You could redeem up to 3 key boxes at once. We made out really well at these three machines, and almost made back all our money. We ended up losing $27, which isn't bad considering we were down more than $150 at one point.

We went back to the hotel and rested until the comedy show. We headed over to Rue St Denis for the comedy show, part of the Just For Laughs 2004 Festival. The comedy show was hosted by TV personality Caroline Rhea, star of the TV series Sabrina the Teenage Witch and host of a popular syndicated talk show. Caroline was very funny and so were the 7 or so stand-up comics that were featured during the show. Unfortunately I can't remember any of their names, but they were all fantastic. This was definitely one of the highlights of our vacation.