Welcome To Fabulous Las Vegas

So I have to be honest here. At this point the trip starts to get a little hazy for me. This is for three major reasons –

1.  My journaling skills were not up to scratch and I spent the majority of our time in the states trying to catch up on myself.

2.  It is, unbelievably, six months since we were in Vegas and so my brain is starting to forget.

3. We spent about 90% of our time there, completely blind drunk.

Nonetheless, I will persevere and attempt to tell the story… After an interesting couple of days at Disneyland, we packed up McQueen – throwing the cases over the top was becoming particularly tiresome by now – and drove about four hours to beautiful Nevada. Whenever I think of Las Vegas I always think of Elliott Gould’s character in the film ‘Ocean’s Eleven’, “Of course, lest we forget, once you’re out the front door, you’re still in the middle of the f***ing desert!” This is so true, Las Vegas is in the middle of nowhere, but that makes the drive from Anaheim really truly stunning winding through lush greenery and mountainous roads before opening up onto vast plains of nothingness. Of course, this being us and our penchant for taking drama everywhere we go, we did have a little problem at our first ‘gas’ stop. In the UK, petrol pumps are coloured green, whilst diesel are black. In the US it’s not quite as straightforward and at this station, the colours were reversed. This led to a good 5-10 minutes of us arguing on the forecourt in about 30 degree heat about why the heck we couldn’t fill up the car. On top of this, the station required you to guess roughly how much petrol you would need and pre-pay for fuel to prevent you from filling up and driving out into the wilderness. Another day, another adventure…

Anyway, after the fun with the car, driving in silence for the next 30 minutes inwardly seething at each other and stopping for a quick Burger King about an hour out of the city, we arrived at our hotel relatively unscathed. The Aria Resort is by far one of the best hotels we have ever stayed in and I would absolutely recommend it to anyone who is planning a trip. It is located just back from the strip, although we upgraded to a strip view room and it was awesome. Whilst perhaps it is not as visually interesting as some of the themed hotels on the strip, this also means that the hotel is not invaded daily by hundreds of annoying tourists wanting to take photos (which we were at every single other hotel throughout our stay, I think The Venetian is my favourite).

After messing about with the various controls on the tablet and getting a bath in our huge tub, we headed over to The Venetian to meet up with Richard’s brother who was purely coincidentally in town for a conference. Stuart claims to work in IT, but I am still utterly convinced that he’s a spy as he’s always jet setting around the world… anyway, we gate crashed a work gathering and took advantage of the free alcohol before taking a pub crawl down the strip. The Venetian is incredible, the ceilings are painted so that it is constantly daytime and they even have their own canals and gondoliers. Our journey took us through The Mirage, The Linq, Caesars Palace and The Bellagio, where we gambled and drank a lot (it’s not a rumour, you will get free drinks at a table you’re gambling at) before ending up in our hotel casino where we met Steve who had in his words been working in Vegas since “before your parents were born”. We went to bed having gambled and drank all night for the total cost of three whole dollars and to the news that President Donald Trump had just been elected…

Waking up in Vegas on day two and realising that we hadn’t dreamt it all, we decided the best thing to do was get drunk again. We headed out onto the strip in the sunshine and went to get breakfast at The Hard Rock Cafe. The food and our server, Lauren, were both awesome and we’d both ordered The Endless Mimosa for $15each. Whether Lauren was just thinking of her tip, or if she truly enjoys watching people get very drunk at 10am I’m still not entirely sure, but she certainly made sure we got our money’s worth. At one point she topped up our glasses, told us to chug it all down and then topped them up again. Afterwards, we headed across the street to the New York, New York where we stupidly decided to ride the rollercoaster. Whilst I don’t regret this, I probably wouldn’t ride it again – or perhaps just not straight after a predominately liquid breakfast. We carried on up the strip stopping for a drink at Excalibur and taking some photos at The Luxor, before heading back to our hotel. After a week or so of non-stop action, we finally slowed down and drank Mojitos at the pool bar soaking up the late Autumn rays. In the evening, we headed back over to The Venetian to take Stuart on his own pub crawl and try and replicate the successes of the previous night. We ended up on what felt like the seedier side of the strip and had about a gazillion “business cards” of topless ladies thrust at us – bizarrely they had edited out all of their nipples, I assume to keep it family friendly… after Stu lost all his money in about 10 minutes playing roulette at Planet Hollywood, we took him back to his hotel and Rich’s lucky streak, and more free drinks, continued back at our hotel.

We decided not to hit the casino for a third night running, reasoning that the house always wins in the end and as we had beaten the house twice, our luck was wearing thin. All Vegased out, we looked towards heading back to wonderful California for the final part of our American adventure.

#Love #RTW #Vegas #brunch #featured #Travel