Vegas!

Ahh! We had a good time!


To start, any of you who have met my husband may or may not know he's a worry wart. Sometimes, you can't tell, but I can. As it got closer to our departure date, he become more and more obsessed (yes, that is the absolute RIGHT word) with the fact that it was supposed to rain on Sunday, the day we were to fly out to Vegas. He had me call and see if we could move our flight up a bit in the day (but that would have cost too much) and fretted all day. He seriously made himself sick. Well, we did have a delay due to weather, but it was very lame. We took off an hour and fifteen minutes late and arrived not that much later than planned (the pilot said we were re-routed and that actually we were able to shorten the flight). And the only reason we were delayed is some runways were closed due to rain...but not ours. Everything just got backed up because all the other planes were having to use our runways, so we had to wait our turn. It was actually a pretty smooth flight, I got to lay down on the empty seat next to me (I fell asleep and woke myself up by jerking awake...plane sleeping is NOT normal), and mostly watched Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 on the ride. (hooray for free digital copies)


When we got here, we came straight to the hotel to get checked in. Our last experience with hotels was better than this one. It's a nice hotel, but, jeeze, they follow really stupid rules. When you make your reservation, you click if you want a king suite or a double suite (would be 2 queen beds). We want a king bed! Duh! As we were checking in, the lady behind the desk (whose English was rough and neither of us could quite understand her) said all that was available (she's sorry) were double queen rooms. We actually had already overheard this with another couple (who, incidentally, was offered a smoking King room and I guess took it since we weren't) so we were ready to argue. Because, really, why bother being able to say you want to reserve a certain bed if you're not actually going to follow through with the reservations, stupid hotel. She explained that reservations promise a room, but not the type of room, or something like that. I don't care if it makes sense to hotels or not, we were perturbed, to say the least. So, Brandon argued. She said she was going to talk to her manager, and like FIVE MINUTES LATER came out saying that she got us our room. WHAT?! So all that hoopla about not having a king room was just because they were hoarding it? It's a basic level room...so who is so special that planned customers were going to get gipped just because they didn't want to give out the room? I don't care, because we got it. But that set the precedent for the hotel.

This was our receiving area or whatever you wanna call it. I didn't take a picture of the bedroom area because it was unmade by this point! lol But its about the same size with a king sized bed and armoire instead of couch, chairs, and tv.

It was nice...but nothing uh-mazing. And, weirdly enough, was full of static charges! Our room was the worst and I blame the carpet. It didn't matter what shoes we were wearing, we got shocked all the time. But, even downstairs walking around the Lobby, we got shocked, too. That was a bit annoying because I've never stayed anywhere where I was shocked by static so much!


The food was good. We actually got very tired of eating out all the time. Nothing can be just plain simple in Vegas and I found myself missing some boring fast food or plain pizza or whatnot. But we did eat at Mario Batali's Italian steakhouse called Carnevino at the Palazzo. THAT was UH-MAZING. The steaks were perfection, the calamari we had was done exactly right, and the pasta was yummy. This was one of my sad points that I'm not drinking alcohol because a glass of wine with that dinner would have just topped it all off nicely.


We also stopped at a place called The Burger Bar. The burgers were good, but their milkshakes were wonderful! They also had alcoholic shakes, which Brandon did not try, but here is my shake, called the Black and White. It was cookie dough ice cream with cookie chunks and chocolate chips in it, topped with chocolate icing, chocolate syrup, and chocolate chips. Yum!

We walked around a lot, looking at the different hotels and such. The Bellagio has a butterfly habitat and they changed it since the last time we were there. The area is full of beautiful flowers, and especially tulips this time around, but this time, instead of a huge net with butterflies just wherever they want to be, they reduced it to a a green house area and had feeding stations for the butterflies.

 

Left is the hotel New York, New York, and right is a closer picture of New York, New York's Statue of Liberty. 

The MGM Grand Lion in the background...

Eiffel tower of the Paris hotel.

At the Bellagio in front of the fountains, staring at the Paris hotel.

We usually don't do shows. We like to spend our money on expensive restaurants, like Mario Batali's, and, this time around, were cognizant that the more we took home, the easier it would be to buy things for the new house. (CLOSING IS THIS WEEK OMG!) But we visited the Shark Reef Aquarium at Mandalay Bay. My pictures of the sharks came out pretty crappy because they swim too fast for the shutter speed on my little camera. (remember my wish list for a new camera? ya, still want it!) Either way, I'll share what I can.

Left (crappy pic, sorry, but he wouldn't cooperate) is an alligator. Right is a komodo dragon!

Left: pirahnas! Right: shark!

Left: Tropical fish eating broccoli. Right: sting rays

Jellyfish!

Left: petable stingray. Right: more sharks

Sorry for the darkness...but they didn't have lights in this area of the tanks. This is a ray shark. He's so weird!

Oh, and the lion habitat at the MGM Grand is free (mostly because it's just the 3 lions who are super cute hanging out in their habitat). The overhead informational said that lions often sleep upwards of 20 hours a day (my kind of life), but we were lucky they were awake and playing around when we went by the first time. The day we left we saw them snoozing and OH MY GOSH are they cute sleepers!

We saw Pete Rose...but didn't get in line to meet him.

We did well gambling. Wait, let me rephrase. Brandon did well gambling...I lost money most of the time lol. By the end of the trip, I would play with less money when he would play with more. We only played on machines, and, a few times, his machine would just start dinging a lot (it was counting all the "credits" he won, which translates into cash). I would ask him what he did, and his usual response was, first, "I don't know," then, "Oh, I only won like $10," and finally, "Kim, I won more than $10." Ya, he won a lot more than stupid $10. He asked why I was always mad that he was winning, because I would get mad at him, lol. My answer? Because you keep saying you didn't win anything!!! Also, because it sucks that I never got to be the one who hit some jackpot. I mean, if you sit down and press the slot machine FOUR TIMES and win $500, you SUCK! Thank you very much. But we had lots of fun.


I'll leave it at that. I'm sure it was long enough, but at least there are pictures. Next big event...CLOSING! But, I doubt there will be tons to post about since I believe there is a lease back to the sellers and we won't get the house for another week after closing...but either way, it's a big day coming up!


Also, I posted some new gibberish on Along Comes a Minion, if you're interested!