vegas, baby!

Every couple years my mom and I take a girls trip. Our first trip was in 2005 and we went to Waikiki Beach on Oahu in Hawaii. It was awesome! Seeing as how my days as a mom of one are numbered, she suggested we take another girls trip. Yahoo! We went to Las Vegas last week for some fun in the sun.

Ahhh Vegas. It's 50 degrees in Seattle and it's close to 90 there. It was great!

You may be thinking, "Angela darling, you are a silly little Mormon girl, whatever do you do in Vegas?"

PLENTY!

Tuesday

We checked in and ate some lunch, then went to the pool for a little bit. Mom thought it was funny that while we were checking in, we were just chat chat chatting away and lots of other people in line were quiet and stoic. Weren't they on vacation, too!?! I was so happy to see my mom :-)

The view from our room at the Flamingo...





That night I got together with one of my old BYU roommates, Audra, who lives in Henderson with her husband Ben and two kids. SO FUN. We talked about old friends and bad dates and crazy roommates and more. It was great! Her kids are darling and it was wonderful to see her again. I'm so happy things are going well for her. She cooked me dinner at her place, while Mom relaxed at the hotel with our lunch leftovers.

Welcome to Las Vegas...






Wednesday

Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville for breakfast... yum... even though it's Jimmy Buffet's it is not a "buffet," so remember that.



Las Vegas Interesting Fact #1: Mom told me about this hilarious thing called the "Buffet of Buffets" or something. It's $45, which you may think is steep, BUT... it's 24 hours of buffets at a bunch of participating buffets around the city. Mom said if you price it just right you can get a late breakfast one day and an early breakfast the next day. All you can eat food for $45! Not bad!! I found that in general, food in Vegas isn't as cheap as it used to be. It's pretty standard now... the way of the "$4.99 all-you-can-eat shrimp and steak" days are over. We didn't do this crazy buffet, but it's a wild and exciting idea, huh?

Since the Flamingo has Donnie and Marie performing, there were lots of Donnie and Marie photo ops :-) Mom loved it. Here she is with Donnie!



We walked to the new Fashion Show Mall which is just a big mall. I suppose I basically wanted to see the crazy architecture up close. I didn't take a picture; not sure why. It has this wild moon roof thing. Along the way we stopped at McDonald's for the free WiFi. That's right, we managed to go the whole time without Internet! I was on vacation! I did have my smartphone, though, whew.

Waterfalls at the Mirage...



Lunch was at the Venetian... we were going to meet a friend of mine and her mom; we were friends growing up in Salisbury and our moms both knew each other. But it didn't work out because she had some scheduling difficulties at the last minute. Bummer! But that didn't stop us from enjoying the views at the Venetian and some great tomato basil pizza at Otto Enoteca Pizzeria, which a friend recommended. And then some gelato. (I liked the gelato, don't get me wrong... but it could have been better! Really! Maybe I am a gelato snob??)



After enough walking we relaxed in our room. We wanted to be well rested because we were nervous about getting down to Mandalay Bay for The Lion King that night.

Mandalay Bay is all the way at the end of the strip, and we were frankly nervous about transportation. Do we walk? Do we take a hybrid of three free trams? Do we try the bus? I convinced Mom to do the bus! We couldn't find the closest stop so we walked for a little bit until we came to one. We bought two 24-hour passes and crammed ourselves on the bottom of the double-decker city transit bus.

On this particular bus trip a woman (who I felt was maybe drunk?) commented on my pregnant self. She at first remarked that it looked like I was about to pop... and I told her I had until December. She was surprised and asked -- literally, I kid you not -- how much weight I had gained. Ummm yeah. I dodged the question with a funny, "Haha, I really try not to think about it!" but boy, it was awkward. Then she was going on about how big the baby would be and blah blah... I was glad when we finally got to our stop. I waited until I was in an elevator alone with my mom to say, "wow, that lady really made me uncomfortable." And Mom said I handled it very well and some people are just loons. Whew.

The Lion King was awesome. Awesome. The guy who played Scar was so good. The costumes for the animals (like the big elephant, the giraffes, the birds) were excellent. It was cool that the songs matched the movie so well; I knew most of them! There was one part, remember how Timone and Pumbaa make a "diversion" at one point and sing a song about "are you aching, yup yup yup, for some bacon, yup yup yup...," etc.? They didn't do that song! They did another one! It was less cool. But there were a few funny lines added to the script relating to Las Vegas that made me laugh.



Afterwards I had to pretend to be buff by the sign. Then we ate at Red, White, and Blue, an American restaurant another friend recommended, and I'll remember those potato skins for the rest of my life. Good choice!

One of my artsy fartsy pictures of the Luxor...



The main crazy (scary?) part of our trip comes here. We needed to take the bus home. The double-decker bus had announced -- when we got off, a few hours earlier -- that Mandalay Bay was its last stop on the strip and it would do a U-Turn and head back in the other direction. So we tried to catch one of those. But the first bus that came was NOT a double-decker bus, but we thought they were the same transit system, right? Wrong. Evidently we took a REGULAR bus which took us to some transit station MILES AWAY at MIDNIGHT. Seriously. We had to get off the bus and head to the other side of the transit station and hope and pray another one of those buses came by to rescue us. We waited about 15 minutes before one came. Plenty of interesting characters were at this bus terminal. I frankly was a little nervous. But it was well lit and we survived to tell the tale. Whew. Thanks for sticking by me Mom! Glad we can laugh about it now! We made it back to the hotel, where we promptly fell asleep, around 1!

Thursday

Thursday we slept in! We went right to the pool, around maybe 11, and had some breakfast at the cafe there. When we were done we went to find somewhere to sit AND THE PLACE WAS PACKED. We couldn't find any lounge chairs. Gee! I was astonished at how busy it was. So, we found a nice little spot and hid our bags and jumped in the water!! We hung out in the pool, kept an eye on our stuff, chatted like silly ladies, and got all wrinkly. It was awesome. Relaxing. Sunny.

We had tickets for Cirque du Soleil's KA at MGM that night, but they were vouchers we needed to exchange for actual seats at the MGM box office. We decided to get down there early, I think we got there at 4:30 PM or something.



I arranged to meet another friend I hadn't seen in awhile at MGM, a guy from high school named Stuart. There was a group of 4 or so of us that were really close, and Stuart and I were both in that group in high school. It was good to see him! He's in the Air Force now, stationed outside of Las Vegas. He looks great -- buff! The years haven't treated everyone from high school as kindly, haha.

We checked out the Lion Habitat and got some beverages from Starbucks...







Las Vegas Interesting Fact #2: They are closing the Lion Habitat soon, which I think is lame. It's a really cool attraction. There was a narrator sharing some info about the habitat; evidently, there is a rich guy who owns some land a few miles from the Strip and he has 30+ lions on the land. The lions in the Habitat are his lions, which they rotate daily. There are always two on site, but generally never the same two! Interesting. I wish I was a kabillionaire that had my own lion zoo. Could be fun.

Next up was KA. Um, KA was AWESOME. The show was only an hour and a half, and in the first 10 minutes I was like, "well, what else can they do? I've already been incredibly amazed!" Well, yeah, it got even better. The most incredible part, I thought, was this guy like, running and jumping and jump-roping on the outside of a HUGE human-sized double hamster wheel. I wish I could explain it better. It was incredible.

There were incredible daredevil stunts, fire fights on a vertical stage, bad guys and good guys, love, humor... it was a great show. Cirque du Soleil is not cheap, but I definitely recommend it. (The last time I went to Vegas with Shane and my folks we all saw O at the Bellagio, which is also very cool.)

So of course, they make it look easy, and I had to pretend to be all limber afterwards...check out my belly...haha...



The show ended early so we decided to take our time walking back to the Flamingo. I had to stop at every gift shop to find the perfect shirts for my family. I found a great one for Wesley, but gave up finding one I thought Shane would like in his size. So much for 4 for $10!

When we got back it still wasn't too late, and Mom had joined the Flamingo's "rewards club" to save a few bucks at the gift shop (not even sure we used the card, did we Mom?), so she had 5 free bucks to spend at the casino. Haha! We found a good slot machine and she earned herself 4 real dollars from her fake 5 bucks! GO MOM!









Las Vegas Interesting Fact #3: Unlike the rest of the human world, you can smoke inside buildings in Las Vegas. I was surprised at how yucky it made me feel. There are rules that you can only smoke in the casino, like not in the restaurants and lobbies and other public places (I think), but since the wayfinding in Vegas always always always takes you directly through the casinos in order for you to spend your money, this got super uncomfortable. Sigh. I am glad I live in a city where there is no smoking in buildings. I was thinking about it, and by the amount of people you see smoking in Vegas you may assume that like, everyone in the world smokes. But if I think about all of my friends, I don't think I know anyone who smokes. OK I know one guy at work. That's it. I used to know two people at work, but the girl quit when she got pregnant with her first baby. So there. Pregnant ladies do not like smoke.

Friday

We left pretty early. Sigh. Girls week was over. We laughed lots, saw really cool things, shopped until we dropped, walked a marathon (it felt like), had loads of fun, and ate excellent amounts of good food. (This one was in the display case for the breakfast/cookie shop near the elevators... Mom says they have lots of stuff like this on cruise ships...)



Mom, I can't wait to do it again in 5 years! It was just what I needed to de-stress. Thank you for planning this adventure and letting me come along.