It’s about 10:30 on a cold, rainy Thursday morning in January. A car pulls off Interstate 4 onto Orient Road. Downtown Tampa’s skyline fills the horizon to the west.
Finding parking, the driver thinks, should be easy at this hour. Especially given these conditions.
But it’s not. And that’s because what the driver is looking for is a parking space in a garage at the Seminole Hard Rock Resort & Casino in Tampa. And what the driver is about to learn — the hard way — is that regardless of the time or weather the place is packed.
“Yeah, it always pretty crowded,” says Darien Cobb, the resort’s manager of public relations and community affairs. (Crowded enough that in slot machines alone the casino paid out $14.43 billion in winnings last year.)
