Viva Las Vegas

We rejoin our heroes in the hot desert on the way to Las Vegas for a couple days. 
Our first stop was the Hoover Dam.  The last time I had been there, they were working on the new bridge, and this time it was completed.  So we went up to the top and walked across it; 880 feet in the air!

 We had booked a 4-star hotel for super cheap, and ended up on the 20th floor of the Las Vegas Hotel, in a sweeeeeet room!  It was overlooking the pool and tennis courts and had a view of the strip.

It also had the monorail station in the hotel, so we got a pass and could ride it down to the strip to walk around instead of driving everywhere. We looked up all the free things to go see and spent our time going from place to place. This was a spiral escalator inside Caesar's Palace that was pretty nifty.

And the painted cloud ceilings inside Caesar's and the Venetian.

Stopped for a rest, and to check out the fish in the aquarium.

 

 The gondola boat rides out in front of the Venetian

There are some shows that they do out in front of some of the hotels.  We first went to Treasure Island to see the pirate show.  I last saw this show a few years ago and it was so fun! Two pirate ships met and shot cannonballs at each other and there were pirates diving into the water, fireworks were going off, etc.  This time the show started and a bikini-cad hooch comes out as a "siren" and lures a pirate onto her ship.  Soon there were many hoochies dancing and singing (terribly) and another pirate ship comes along.... not sure what else happened, we walked off after that. So apparently they decided to make the show more Vegas-y and it was so stupid. All the people around us were groaning and rolling their eyes as well.  So we moved down the street and caught the volcano show in front of the Mirage, which was much better.

Brannan is actually amazed, not bored, by the spewing lava

The next morning we checked out the Luxor, which turned out to be a surprising engineering feat

The Luxor is the one that is a huge pyramid, and apparently it's completely hollow inside, with all the rooms up the outside of the walls.  Each floor goes up and in a tier of the pyramid.  And the elevators go up at an angle! Who knew.

We snuck up to the 10th floor to get a better look. It was pretty fascinating.

Of course we stopped at the M&M store, which had every branded souvenir item ever imaginable, as well as the huge wall of M&M's. We decided not to get any since it was 105 degrees outside and we'd have to snarf them all down before we walked out the door.  Although supposedly they melt in your mouth, not in your hand...

The "Eiffel Tower" at the Paris Hotel.  We'll have something to compare this to in about 1 week!

Friday night was Brannan's 29th birthday so we had planned to go see Phantom of the Opera at the Venetian.  The Phantom Theater was built especially for this play, so we figured it was going to be pretty special.

Here's the theater entrance. We had asked an older gentleman if he would take our picture, assuming he would take it with the sign (as in the picture above), but instead got just what we asked for. A picture of us! Oh well, here's us in front of the Phantom theater, not just some random hallway.

The usher kept hollering at people not to take picture in the theater (only because there was a professional photographer you were supposed to pay if you wanted your picture in the theater), but people kept snapping pictures. So we snuck one in when she was distracted. Don't tell

The floating discs above the audience are the different tiers of the chandelier. When the play started, they all lit up and swirled around each other, then assembled to become the chandelier. SO awesome! 

Brannan's face displays the fear of getting caught by the usher

 The play was definitely the highlight of the Vegas trip. At the part during the play when the chandelier falls, the sides of the theater were on FIRE and the chandelier was shaking, then it came falling FAST towards the audience and then the lights went out!! Everyone gasped - it was so awesome! 

The next morning we had a brunch buffet at the Rio, which was enormous.  After stuffing ourselves to the bursting point, we headed out of town.  This week we are at my parent's house in Idaho doing a whole lot of nothing before we leave for Iceland on Monday! After that last week of work/packing/moving/repairs/cleaning and then a week after that of fun vacationing, we are ready for some mindlessness that will probably include a lot of Mario Kart and TV.