Vegas Day 1: We're back! Las Vegas Retail

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ICSC Dealmaking Convention 2008

We're in town for the annual convention, that means a lot of work for Manny, and a lot of playing for me. We have the party at the Bellagio Grand Patio this evening, should be a toasty affair in more ways than one.

Off the Strip Shopping

We took the 7:30AM direct flight this morning to Vegas and got in early this morning. We started the day by visiting the malls around town to see what the market competition is in case we do a project in Las Vegas - for me, it's work; for Jennifer, it's shopping. There are two types of shopping in Las Vegas - on the strip for tourists and off the strip for locals. On the Strip is designated for Sunday and includes the Forum Shops, Fashion Show Mall, The Shops at Palazzo, Miracle Mile - all of what people identify with Vegas - haute couture shopping. Today we visited the Galleria at Sunset - a standard meat-and-potatoes mall on the southeast end of town; the District at Green Valley Ranch, an open-air pedestrian street with restaurants and shops, attached to the casino-hotel that was featured in the A&E television series; the Las Vegas Outlets, which are mainly garbage but have a Saks Off 5th Avenue Outlet Store where we lightened our wallet significantly; and the centerpiece of current retail, Turnberry's new Las Vegas Town Square, an Easton-like project designed in a more desert-like fashion where now amount of misters mounted in the palm trees can attenuate the 100 degree heat. Sorry, no pictures of that since we are professionals and not tourists.

The short of it is, if you want to do shopping in Las Vegas, go to the Forum Shops to look around and go to Fashion Show Mall to intensively wrap things up.

Dinner at Joe's Steakhouse and Stone Crab

A top dining destination, we joined into Josh's dinner with Hot Topic's real estate people and had a great time - excellent seafood, steak, scallops. It goes without saying we ate too much (especially me) and of course fine wines flowed like they were water, but I have to say their wine list was not that good and the Burgundy and Bordeaux selections they had were drastically overpriced and a disappointment as I tried to showcase to our Californian friends from Newport and Redondo Beach the quality of French wines. We have agreed to explore in more depth in the future.

Time for bed, hasta manana for the convention center.

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Photos

Then & Now
Almost 7 years ago . . . we stayed at Caesar's Palace on business trip with Tom.

Our Room
Understated contemporary elegance, we still like the Four Seasons better.

Bellagio Fountain
Still don't know how to work the exposure setting on my new camera, but the fountain in part of its glory!

Bellagio
That's our room right there in the top left corner see?