VEGAS BABY!

Friday, I headed for Las Vegas.  I had never been to Vegas before.  I told a young man at a place where I had lunch one day that this was my first visit and he could not believe it.  As we drove to Vegas, we suddenly started going through sleet and then snow. What? The high in Vegas on Friday was 65 degrees.  This weather is crazy!

We stayed at the RV park at the Main Street Station Casino which is located in the old downtown section of Vegas. We parked the RV and then walked through the attached parking lot for the casino to go to the lobby to check in. Believe me, we knew right away that we would not be walking this path at night.  It was a good place for us to stay for what we had planned to do and it does have security.  It was $17 a night.  The sewer hookup was nasty so we won't get into that.  You were also right on top of each other.  The first space they assigned us, our slide would almost touch the people's slide next to us on both sides.  We looked around the lot and asked them if we could move spaces which they did let us do.  If we go back to Vegas, we won't be staying there.

After we got settled, we decided to go to the Mirage to pick up our tickets we had bought for a Cirque de Soleil show on Saturday night.  There are about 5 Cirque de Soleil shows going on at different casinos/hotels.  Remember I said this was our first trip to Vegas?  Well, if you have never been before, it can be a bit overwhelming.  Most of the casinos/hotels on the strip are like their own little city.  They do not want you to have to leave.  They have restaurants, all kinds of stores, spas, bars, delis, bakeries, nail salons, theaters.......and the list goes on.  The casino areas are G-I-G-A-N-T-I-C.  We also walked through Treasure Island since it has a connecting walkway from the Mirage.

So, we decided to go see as many casinos/hotels as we could on Saturday.  We started at the MGM Grand.  It had a connecting walkway to New York, New York.  You could then catch a tram from New York, New York to Excalibur and then to the Luxor.  So, here we went.

Excalibur Casino/Hotel

This is for Daughter-in-Law.  It is made out of jelly beans.

 

Before I knew it, it was time to go back and get ready for the show.  All I can tell you about the show is that is was AWESOME.  The arena was arranged in such a way that there wasn't a bad seat in the house.  There was sound coming from a lot of different places including your seat.  Of course the Beatles were of my generation and when I was a teenager, their heavier psychedelic music and they played a lot of that music.  I felt like I needed to have on my hip huggers and my tie-dyed shirt with the peace signs all over it.  But, I loved it.  If I go back to Vegas, I will definitely go to more shows.

 

We decided to go outside and see what Vegas looks like at night.  I also wanted to go to the Venetian and see the gondolas.

 

This was a row of shops that look like you are walking outside, down a street.  They had a mall that looked like this in Dubai.

They had the gondola canals inside and outside

Through Facebook, I found out that a friend from high school was going to be in Vegas at the same time as I was.  So, Sunday we decided to meet up for about an hour.  They had dinner reservations in the Eiffel Tower in the Paris Casino/Hotel.  We met and decided we would go up in the tower and sit in the bar so we could talk and be away from all the smoke in the casinos.  It was great visiting with her and do a little catching up.  Afterward, we decided to try our hand at penny slots again.  Mr. W put in $5, got up to $12, and then lost it all.  It was time to leave.  And so that was my few days in Vegas.  I will say that I kept trying to post my blog about the last day in the Grand Canyon and I'm not sure why, but Las Vegas has the worse internet signals of anyplace in the USA.  I'm not sure if they do something to keep people from using their internet connections to cheat at the casinos or what but it took me 3 days to get this blog written and posedt. I've never seen such a large city with such crappy service.

I left this morning and headed for South Utah and Zion National Park.  I would like to go back to Vegas sometime.  I would want to see more shows and also go to the Hoover Dam. It was a fun time.

My friend Renee