20th Anniversary Getaway

  I surprised Cindy with a quick getaway to Las Vegas for our 20th wedding anniversary.  The girls (and my parents) and I did a nice job of keeping the secret all the way until the day of travel.  Cindy was surprised, yet had time enough to pack to her liking.  I flew my parents in to watch the kids... it was so well timed, we met my parents crossing at the airport and passed off our vehicle for them to use.

  Me and Cindy getting waiting to leave at the airport.

  Here's Cindy going through the casino to get to our room... every route is 'through the casino' as everyone knows. This is MGM Grand where we stayed, but it could of been 1 of N where N is a large number of casinos. No windows, no clocks, it all looked pretty much the same no matter what hour you were there. I don't know about pumped in oxygen to keep you awake, but it was very well ventilated and they did pump in various fragrances which probably helped everyone stay awake.

  Man... if there is one thing that I didn't realize before actually getting to Las Vegas was the scale of the place. The Hoover Dam tour guide (driver, not the people at the dam) gave us a lot of interesting information about Las Vegas (as well as profusely using the obligatory 'dam jokes'... which never really got old). The 'strip', Las Vegas Blvd, is over 5 miles long. When you look at a map, walking from the MGM to the Bellagio is 2-3 hotels apart. That's almost a mile... then the casinos are all set back a few hundred yards off the strip, so the 'necessary' stops along the way make it more of a hike than you think at first glance at a map.

  If you walk through the casinos, by the restaurants and shops just at the MGM resort in one loop it is over 1 mile. We went to the concierge to ask something and I commented on the size of the hotel... the lady looked puzzled that I didn't know that it's one of the largest hotels in the world... and for quite a while it was #1. How large is that? In one structure, over 5,000 rooms. All total, over 7,000 rooms on property in multiple buildings. Where does that put them now? 2 or 3 depending on the way you count rooms. Caesar's Palace has 7,000 in one structure and the Venetian has around 8,000. In fact, 8 of the top ten largest hotels are in Las Vegas on the strip.

   First step... put in 20$... next step... take out 100$. It's GO time lucky Cindy! And yeah... no more clinking of payout coins except through a speaker... it's all printed vouchers.

   Geeky I know, but I drug Cindy on a tour of the Hoover Dam. It was awesome! Oh yeah, I'm a geek, so makes sense. Here I am in the power station, approximately 525 feet down. The upper left windows above the generators are about 3 feet above the water line on the dam output side.

  Here's Cindy on the dam with the new, Pat Tillman bridge as a backdrop. You can still drive over the dam, but you immediately are forced to turn around and come back. The dam was really high... but I swear, it felt like the bridge was another 500 feet above you. There are people walking across the bridge that you cannot even see in the picture.

   Tough to get a good picture with the dam... just too big. And after all the food, I may run into the same issue.

  Hey, I found a use for the panorama feature... I love this pic of Cindy and the strip. You can see the green MGM on the right all the way to the Eiffel Tower at Paris on the left.

  Oh yeah... black... jack! I'm glad Cindy quickly snapped this... it (black jack or even winning for that matter) didn't happen much for me.

   As far as food, we ate at MGM's buffet for breakfast and it was not your typical buffet food... it was very good food... and they had about half an acre of unique items. Try not over indulging... very difficult. The sit-down food was even better. I made reservations at Scarpetta in the Cosmopolitan for our anniversary dinner and we had a table overlooking the fountains at the Bellagio. The food was some of the best I've ever had. After dinner dessert was at Sugar Factory. The s'mores crepe while watching the fountains did not disappoint either.
  We attended one show, Cirque du Soleil "O". The show was fantastic. Some of the acts were just unbelievable. Even the set was awesome to see as it moved and changed, for a geek it was the show within the show.

   Well... at some point we started putting in 20.00$ and getting 0.04$ back :)  But as the dam tour guy said... there are no losers, just winners and investors. He pointed out that all those palm trees lining the strip? They are not indigenous and are brought in from all around the world. Let's just say we made our own small investment in the casinos this trip. Maybe we'll go back one day and see if we can get a little ROI.


  I think the first sign (that I'll mention on a family blog) we noticed at the Las Vegas airport was for a Buffet of Buffets. That general idea summed up almost every over-the-top aspect of Las Vegas, food or otherwise. What a fun trip!