Thursday – Monday: Las Vegas (extra long)

We left Thursday to go to Las Vegas, meet a friend from WoW, and show his wife that we weren’t imaginary. We made our connecting flight in Detriot (yay) and got there without any significant problems. We ate dinner and by the time I went to bed I had been up for 21 hours…much longer than normal but adrenaline was helping.

Friday Ben and I walked around the gardens before Steven and Jen got up.



For breakfast I had a wonderful small French toast with chocolate and cranberries. Delicious. After a bit of gambling Jen and I went to the spa. It was amazing. They have showers that have four heads…so you never have to be out of the water. I’ve thought for a while that that should be the standard way of showers (although two would probably be ok most of the time). They also had some lovely pools and I got a relaxing massage.

spa link

Our show of the night was Cirque du Soleil: Ka. I loved it. They had this amazing floor that rotated in a half of hemisphere…so it could be a floor, or a wall, or halfway in between. There was also a scene with hand shadow puppets that was really cool and some people costumed as animals that were cute/funny.

Ka link

Afterwards we went out for a nice dinner. We found out that Steve really loves his meat. I had some colossal shrimp prepared in an excellent way.

Saturday I lost money in the morning before breakfast which was sad. However, breakfast was a buffet and it was very happy. There was so much food and lots of sweet breakfast food.  There was a lack of fresh fruit, but the rest of the options made up for that. We walked around the casinos a bit.

I drank tequila for my once-every-four-years time because maybe my tastes changed. They didn’t. I think everyone enjoyed the looks on my face though.

Ben played some blackjack, and then I took a nap. That evening we went to a Penn and Teller show. Talking afterwards we were able to figure out possibilities as to how they did all the tricks, but some of them alluded us completely and even if we did know their execution was awesome.  We took a quick trip up the Eiffel tower before bed.

Sunday was our friends last day.  We had a not so good brunch at Caesar’s (more expensive and not as many options.) Oh well, the food was still good. We did some more walking around and finally got a picture of all of us together to prove it wasn’t an imaginary trip.

(Glass flowers in a ceiling in the Bellagio)

Ben managed to get tickets for Cirque “O” in the evening. It was good, but I think I enjoyed Ka better. They did have more traditional and cool acrobatics though.

O link

We played some Texas hold em’ before bed. I think that was maybe my favorite gambling of the trip. Maybe because I was actually making money. That does always help.

We got up a half hour early on Monday so we could play some Craps before the flight since that was the only thing that we hadn’t played that we wanted to try. We managed to come out ahead on that too, so it was a good note to end on.

So some overall thoughts:

1. We came out about even or maybe slightly ahead on money that was gambled. I think Ben was a little ahead and I was a little behind.

2. Steve and Jen are fun traveling partners. 

3. It was a lot of fun to go with people who had been to Las Vegas before and knew some of the good places to go/things to do/ or at least sort of knew their way around.