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catspawWhat a place! We had a total hoot :-D
I wasn't that sure that I would like it before I actually got there. Sure, it was tacky, sure it was dedicated to parting you from wads of your cash - but it was all done with the greatest good humour, which made it much fun indeed :-D
The weather was gorgeous, lovely and sunny and pretty warm for the first few days. It got a bit cooler towards the end of the holiday, but it stayed sunny, so that was okay.
I couldn't get over the scale of the place! Blocks in Vegas are very large, and each hotel/resort covers at least a block: some of them are *huge*, like several football stadia huge 0.0 I was particularly taken with New York, New York, the outside of it anyway, it was such a pretty building
and also it was great fun watching folks whizzing around on the roller coaster *g*
Luxor was fun too, although much smaller than I imagined it would be, it was dwarfed by the buildings around it
I loved the Bellagio as well, the inside was absolutely *stunning*. Scary too though, cuz it was so easy to get lost in it. I wouldn't have cared to try and get out in a hurry, for sure. Caesar's Palace was brilliant as well, it was so easy to stand in the lobby and imagine the Rat Pack sweeping in :-)
At night, the whole place was magical (although it's just as well the Hoover Dam is nearby, the power usage must be immense).
This is Excalibur
Isn't that just the prettiest thing? Here's the big balloon outside Paris
It's right next to an Eiffel Tower, and an Arc de Triomphe, the latter much easier to get to than the real one ;-)
We went to the Freemont Experience downtown a couple of times at night for the free light shows - here's a flavour of one of them
It was a kind of 'War of the Worlds' thing and it was fabulous!
One really good thing about Vegas: mass transit! I'm not used to being anywhere in the States where it's so easy to move around without a car. It was fabulous, and cheap, and the buses were plentiful. The drivers all had the patience of the saints and did their jobs with humour, punctuating every trip with wryly comical commentary. Great fun. And another really good thing: it was full of people who were really quite well oiled *g*, but I saw no trouble at all. Absolutely none. Even at 3 am when everyone had been drinking bucketloads. Here, at that time of the morning, you can bank on seeing at least one major fight, but nothing of the sort over there at all, and that felt really, really safe, despite the pimps on every corner. They could be quite persistent - they targetted the Man, of course, despite the fact he was already *with* two women - or maybe they thought neither of us was up to much LOL. Hell, they targeted *me*: had I been in the market for a hot babe, I could have been very well provided for ;-)
And I encountered a stereotype :-D A guy on the bus one time, who was probably about ten years younger than me but looked and acted at least 20 years older. There was a chap kicking around in a Homer Simpson outfit and the stereotype (let's call him Norm - Norm Whitbread, probably *g*) asked the bus at large who he was supposed to be. Then told us all he'd never watched a single ep of The Simpsons because he'd heard 'it was kinda crude' and he preferred the older, family shows with a moral, like The Partridge Family and Andy Griffiths. He was shocked at the antics of the jaywalkers too - Lord alone knows what he made of the pimps *g*. Come to that, Lord alone knows what he was doing in Vegas in the first place! Maybe he'd come all the way from Stultify, Nebraska or perhaps Conformity, Alaska, just so he could go home and announce to Mrs. Whitbread, 'Martha, I have looked on the face of sin...' before he gathered the family around the harmonium for a rousing rendition of 'Lead, Kindly Light'.
Bonus! We played the penny slots the entire time and just about broke even! Not quite, but just about :-) A couple of decent wins helped ($80 and $50) and by the time you factor in the free margaritas, slot-type entertainment just about paid for itself :-D
And that just got waaay long, so the side trips will have to wait for the next post :-)
I wasn't that sure that I would like it before I actually got there. Sure, it was tacky, sure it was dedicated to parting you from wads of your cash - but it was all done with the greatest good humour, which made it much fun indeed :-D
The weather was gorgeous, lovely and sunny and pretty warm for the first few days. It got a bit cooler towards the end of the holiday, but it stayed sunny, so that was okay.
I couldn't get over the scale of the place! Blocks in Vegas are very large, and each hotel/resort covers at least a block: some of them are *huge*, like several football stadia huge 0.0 I was particularly taken with New York, New York, the outside of it anyway, it was such a pretty building
and also it was great fun watching folks whizzing around on the roller coaster *g*
Luxor was fun too, although much smaller than I imagined it would be, it was dwarfed by the buildings around it
I loved the Bellagio as well, the inside was absolutely *stunning*. Scary too though, cuz it was so easy to get lost in it. I wouldn't have cared to try and get out in a hurry, for sure. Caesar's Palace was brilliant as well, it was so easy to stand in the lobby and imagine the Rat Pack sweeping in :-)
At night, the whole place was magical (although it's just as well the Hoover Dam is nearby, the power usage must be immense).
This is Excalibur
Isn't that just the prettiest thing? Here's the big balloon outside Paris
It's right next to an Eiffel Tower, and an Arc de Triomphe, the latter much easier to get to than the real one ;-)
We went to the Freemont Experience downtown a couple of times at night for the free light shows - here's a flavour of one of them
It was a kind of 'War of the Worlds' thing and it was fabulous!
One really good thing about Vegas: mass transit! I'm not used to being anywhere in the States where it's so easy to move around without a car. It was fabulous, and cheap, and the buses were plentiful. The drivers all had the patience of the saints and did their jobs with humour, punctuating every trip with wryly comical commentary. Great fun. And another really good thing: it was full of people who were really quite well oiled *g*, but I saw no trouble at all. Absolutely none. Even at 3 am when everyone had been drinking bucketloads. Here, at that time of the morning, you can bank on seeing at least one major fight, but nothing of the sort over there at all, and that felt really, really safe, despite the pimps on every corner. They could be quite persistent - they targetted the Man, of course, despite the fact he was already *with* two women - or maybe they thought neither of us was up to much LOL. Hell, they targeted *me*: had I been in the market for a hot babe, I could have been very well provided for ;-)
And I encountered a stereotype :-D A guy on the bus one time, who was probably about ten years younger than me but looked and acted at least 20 years older. There was a chap kicking around in a Homer Simpson outfit and the stereotype (let's call him Norm - Norm Whitbread, probably *g*) asked the bus at large who he was supposed to be. Then told us all he'd never watched a single ep of The Simpsons because he'd heard 'it was kinda crude' and he preferred the older, family shows with a moral, like The Partridge Family and Andy Griffiths. He was shocked at the antics of the jaywalkers too - Lord alone knows what he made of the pimps *g*. Come to that, Lord alone knows what he was doing in Vegas in the first place! Maybe he'd come all the way from Stultify, Nebraska or perhaps Conformity, Alaska, just so he could go home and announce to Mrs. Whitbread, 'Martha, I have looked on the face of sin...' before he gathered the family around the harmonium for a rousing rendition of 'Lead, Kindly Light'.
Bonus! We played the penny slots the entire time and just about broke even! Not quite, but just about :-) A couple of decent wins helped ($80 and $50) and by the time you factor in the free margaritas, slot-type entertainment just about paid for itself :-D
And that just got waaay long, so the side trips will have to wait for the next post :-)
