Vegas, Baby!

So... we went to Vegas this past week, and we had quite a fun time. First we went to Edmonton to visit family, and then from there we went to Vegas for a few days. On our way to Edmonton, we saw a whale from our airplane window (which actually does make sense, as we had to switch planes in Vancouver). Once we were in Edmonton, we rented a car and proceeded to immediately get lost. We were doing fine (for being on the wrong road), looking for 34th Ave, when the sequence of off-roads started looking something like this: 32nd Ave, 9th St, 4th St, 10th St... At this point we decided Edmontonians can't count, and turned around to look for sanity. Once we were correctly on track to our destination, we saw a sequence where 19th Ave was between 23rd and 34th - this was also confusing. After consulting the map, I was able to verify that yes, this is actually what they meant when they were labeling their roads. Anyways, enough about Edmonton - this post is supposed to be about Vegas!

Because we don't have passports, we had to cross the border by land rather than by air, so we flew to Vancouver, hopped on a bus to Bellingham, and flew to Las Vegas from there. We had to taxi from the bus depot to the airport, and the taxi was very late (watch out, this is a recurring theme). We did make it to the airport on time, though, so we were okay. When we checked in, we saw the airport was packed full of people (and that room did not smell nice). It turns out that there was another flight to Vegas scheduled for earlier that day that ended up just never showing up. Fortunately there are laws saying that when our flight arrived we got first dibs on our seats, but our flight ended up being cram-packed with very angry people from the other flight as well - and not everybody got on our plane either. We ended up being late, but at least we got there! This is where we stayed:



This building makes me feel very very small. The effect is magnified whenever you step inside - it's pretty much hollow inside, so from the lobby you can see the top of the pyramid, more or less. We are such party animals, we went straight to bed. The next morning we ate a humongous breakfast at a buffet, and then set out to explore. We visited a lot of casinos that day, including the Excalibur, New York New York, MGM Grand, the Bellagio, Paris, and the Flamingo (which was oddly balanced, demographic-wise - it seemed like everyone there other than us were old). We also went to the M&M store, which is four storeys tall and features a free 3-D 'movie', which kind of hurt my eyes since at first it's either out of focus or just hard to focus on.

We stopped inside all these places to see the attractions. At the New York New York, there is a giant outdoor roller coaster, which we went on:



We found that there were a lot of people trying to sell us time-shares, which was okay the first time and really annoying the other fifty million times. You start to recognize their shtick pretty quickly, and my boyfriend had a great time thinking of different ways to rebuff them. They pretend they're interested in where we come from, whether we are married, whether we at least live together, how long we're staying, et cetera. They offer you dinners, tickets to the shows, and/or gambling money, as long as you're willing to spend a portion of your day at their time-share presentation. We didn't want to waste our precious time in a high-pressure sales situation, especially considering how insistent the advertisers were. We did, however, find a place that sells tickets to shows half-price, so we did go to one, which I thought was passable, if a bit uncomfortable at times, considering topless girls are not my thing. The price was right, though, and the drink was very good.

The second day, we were tired from all the walking around from the first day, but we decided to do it again, this time pushing ahead even further so that we could try to score free tickets to the Mac King comedy show, an endeavor which we were unsuccessful at. We did a lot of gambling along the way, which was fun because we tried the table games. We did best at roulette but ultimately lost all our money. We had all-you-can-eat sushi at a restaurant across the street from the Bellagio, so we got to watch the fountain show quite a few times over the course of dinner. By the end of that day, we were very tired and worn out, so we sunk into another round of roulette, this time taking advantage of the free cocktails that kept coming around. We won twice on 23 red, which was cool because we always made sure to put a whole chip on 23 instead of using the kitty-corner wallpaper tactics that we used on other numbers.

On the way home from Vegas, we had to go through Bellingham, the cesspit of lost time, again. This time, our bus showed up around an hour late, causing us to miss our connection (which may have been the bus that would later get in an accident with a couple of trucks, but we didn't know that at the time). Luckily there was another bus leaving for home that night, so we got on that one, which had to turn around partway through and go the long way around, since the short route was closed. We did eventually make it home though, hungry, sore and worn out.