Coming into this year, I had spent 5 of the past 6 New Years in Vegas, with the only exception being New Orleans for 2014.

However, this year I decided to try something a bit different and spend it downtown.

All of my previous New Years since 2013 have been at Caesars, where we would get an Augustus Tower room with a strip view, and we'd watch the fireworks from there.

On December 30, I drove to Vegas with my girlfriend and our son. We checked into the Golden Nugget, which is the nicest hotel downtown, but that's not saying a lot.

The Nugget was selling parking spots for $50/each for people spending NYE on Fremont Street, but I'll give them credit in that they "sold out" long before the ran out of spots for guests. Parking was still easy to find.

We got a room in the Gold Tower, which is kind of the mid-grade tower there. It's supposedly renovated, but unlike the recent renovations to Vegas Caesars properties (which all look pretty good), this "renovated" tower looks like it's already getting somewhat worn down.

One amazing thing about the Golden Nugget is that they do not have a single queen bed on the property. Your choice is one king or two doubles. Two doubles? I haven't seen double beds in a US hotel in a long time. Embarrassing. For those of you wondering, a double is also known as a full, and it's only 53x75 inches. A queen is 60x80 inches, which is a huge difference. A king is 76x80.

"Double" is a misnomer. Two adults cannot fit on one of those, unless they're skinny midgets. In fact, if you're tall like me (between 6'2" and 6'3"), then even ONE person can't fit on a double, as your feet will hang over. I had to sleep diagonally in the bed by myself.

The rest of the room, while a bit worn, looked okay. Noise is a huge problem downtown, but fortunately I got assigned a room overlooking the closed pool, so it was actually quiet. We stayed there for 3 nights.

The nickel and diming at Golden Nugget puts even Caesars to shame:

$16/day for a Keurig coffee maker! They told me on the phone that "each room has a Keurig", and I was greeted with the obnoxious charge when I noticed the room didn't have one. I talked my way out of it, stating that I would have brought my own if they hadn't told me that they were already in the room.

$34/day for a refrigerator! We also managed to get that waived.

$40 for a 2pm checkout! We also got that waived, because of an LOL situation with the deadbolt.

Basically the room's deadbolt didn't work. I called, and they sent maintenance, who arrived fairly quickly. At first the guy told me it worked, but I showed him that it didn't, and he quickly conceded that yes, it was broken. He then had another maintenance guy come up, and the two fiddled with it for like 45 minutes, at one point conceding that the lock was irreparably broken and would need a full replacement. Unfortunately they didn't have any equivalent rooms, which upset me. Somehow they managed to somewhat fix it by replacing the "face plate" of the door locking mechanism, but it still didn't work 100% correctly. I found that the only way to get the deadbolt to pop out was to close the door slowly, then wait a second, then push on it, and then you'll hear the deadbolt pop out.

The entire desk area had one plug, and it was in a lamp. That didn't work. They told me they had no more lamps available. LOL again. Fortunately I brought a power strip and stretched it down behind the desk and was barely able to make it reach.

There were some other minor maintenance issues which I won't bother describing. Suffice to say that the next person to get that room should thank me for getting so many things fixed.

Continued....