At the end of January Josh and I got the opportunity to go to Las Vegas for virtually nothing. YAY! We had attended one of those timeshare dealios and jumped through all the hoops in order to go on this trip. The original accommodations were plane tickets late on Sunday, two nights stay at the Wild Wild West Casino, and then early plane tickets home Tuesday morning. Luckily, we got cut a deal. In exchange for our plane tickets, we drove to Las Vegas and got to stay in a really nice hotel that is only about 4 years old, The South Point. No big deal, we love road trips! So Sunday morning we packed the car and took off for Vegas. The road trip down was fun and relaxing. Main points of interest were probably listening to Twilight book on tape, seeing the sunrise over the eastern mountins south of Nephi, seeing the contrast of the snowy peaks against the red rocks of southern Utah, discovering that veggie chips are Mmmm Mmmm Good!, Josh experiencing Virgin River gorge for the first time, and coming up over the hill and seeing Las Vegas beaming in front of us! We got in at about 11:00am Las Vegas time and spent the next few hours hanging out on the south end of the strip. At MGM Grand we saw the Lion exhibit and they even have a baby cub! Josh loved Excalibur and we found this awesome Jackson family Coat of Arms. Maybe next time we will stay there, cause he loved that hotel! We visited Mandalay Bay for the first time, and also New York, New York. I took Josh to the M&M World where we got $6.00 worth of M&Ms (hehe) and then the Coca-Cola Store where we got these yummy floats. They also have a shooters thing you can get with 16 diferent flavors of soda to try. Maybe we will try that next time. It was pretty cool. We checked into our hotel and grabbed some dinner at Panda Express. Sadly, I will admit I fell asleep... four a few hours... and Josh was wide awake just bored out of his mind. He told me he went and played a game of bowling and walked around the casino a bit. I feel so bad, but I was exhausted!!! Once I woke up, we checked out the casino and I showed him how the slot machines worked. We spent abuot $15.00 is all. Good thing gambling isn't our thing, we sure saved a lot of money other people may have spent. Josh was curious about the poker tabels more than anything, but as a newbie he was intimidated to jump right in with the pros. So we just watched. It was fun though. At midnight, our hotel had a bowling alley, and games were $1.00 each after midnight. We payed $4.00 and played a couple games. By then, Josh was super tired (having not taken a four hour nap) and so we got cuddled into bed. Best pillows EVER. The next day we did a LOT... so I'm just going to throw out the highlights.... First, we went to NY, NY and spent some time at the Coney Island area. We got some little silly prizes for Kim and Shay there. We had a boring timeshare meeting, but they played CC bingo and we totally won a gift card to Olive Garden. HAHA. We ate lunch at the buffett at our hotel YUM and then started working on the rest of the strip. YAY. Caesars Palace, Bellagio, Mirage, Treasure Island, Palazzio, Venitian, Paris, Flamingo, etc etc etc... we hit them ALL and saw all of the shows - Ballagio water show, Mirage Volcano, Sirens of TI... we even stopped at the Palazzio and saw this million dollar car show - Josh's favorite! But I did find my dream car there, see below! We found our way back to the Forum Shops at Caesars and to Planet Hollywood, where we had a gift card from the timeshare people. My southwest salad was GOOD! and josh had a guac burger. YUM. Loved eating there. YUMMY. After that we walked back to Caesars where we had left the car and drove up to the Stratosphere. This was really awesome! Did anyone else know there is a ride tat hangs right off the side and the whole point of the ride is to make you feel like you are falling off? Yep, gave me anxiety. I could never do it. But it was neat seeing the whole valley like that. We tried to go find Fremont Street, but by then I had blisters and we were tired. We peeked down the alley's from our car, but didn't park. Last sto was Circus Circus, just to see the Adventureland. Darn it, it was all closed down. All well, next time. Day two was definately a ton of fun! On Tuesday, our last day. We spent the morning being lazy. We walked around our hotel a bit more and checked out early. Before leaving we ate brunch/lunch at the buffett with more free coupons and then headed back to the main part of the strip. There were only a few things on our list today, but they took a long time. Frst, was the Secret Gardens and Dolphin Habitat at the Mirage. This was my absolute favorite part of the trip. I loved it. The dolphins were - no joke - 5 feet from me. There was a low wall we could sit or kneel on, a short 4 ft platform that the trainers walked on, and then pool! sigh... it was so great. There was a 1 year old dolphin named Bella and she was so cute!They also had lions, white tigers, leopards, llamas, and some garden areas. There were baby snow white tigers too that were out playing. We got some small trinkets from the gift shop before heading out. We stopped at a huge gift shop on the strip and found a couple more things. Some bracelets for me and a picture frame, then something for Tracy that was funny. the lat stop before heading back home - I had to go visit one of our centers from my work - out in Henderson. The ladies that work there are so fun, and I told Sally I would come. It was good to meet her and see the center. After replacing Josh's blinker light and finding the freeway again, we got the joy of sitting in rush hour Las Vegas traffic... YAY. haha. that took about an hour, then we were on our way. The drive home was not as fun because it was dark and I couldn't see the scenery, but we still had fun. We stopped for chili fries and josh got a burger at a Carl's Jr. in Cedar City... shortly after that I was asleep. Josh got us safely home and we grabbed the necessities from the car, greeted our poor Keoke kitty we got left by himself, and fell into bed. It was a really great trip though, and we had a ton of fun. Thank you timeshare people!
