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Next stop L.A.. but a brief stop before being whisked away in our charriot with mum over the desert plains to the strip!
We spent most of the journey chatting about what mum had been getting up to the previous week and filling her in on the hardships of living out of a rucksack and living off noodles!
We watched the landscape alter considerably from tourist tack to literally almost nothing but desert and what seemed to be random little towns dumped in the middle connected by a highway. We got excited about reaching Vegas twice..once when we weren't there and the second time once we'd seen the signs for Bellagio and the giant pyramid of the Luxor came into view we allowed ourselves time to get a little more exciteable!
The resort was beautiful, nice apartment with our room right next to the pool, mum bagged the best bed before we had chance to enforce squatters rights so i made up for it by borrowing clothes and generally getting excited about the contents of something that wasn't my own rucksack.
Our first evening we were exposed unawares to the American food portions..we mistakenly opted for a starter platter before our
monster mains arrived but Matt's horror at being unable to finish his plate was soon calmed when he was given the remainder in a box for safe consumption at a later hour..brilliance!
Viva las vegas.. a nice relaxing swim in the resort pool and then it was off to explore the strip starting with our first casino experience in Treasure Island..the only route to get from our Cirque ticket collection to the outside world was through a maze of neon flshing lights, high stakes card tables and scantily clad waitresses and a suprising number of gamblers despite the early hour..well naturally...thats Vegas!! We wandered in the direction of Stratosphere tower..with the idea of dragging a reluctant mother on some thrill rides instead we managed to drag a reluctant Matt into Circus circus whilst keeping an avid lookout for possible traumatic clown encounters..we avoided such incidents and saw a short acrobatic thingymajig before emerging on the streets and deciding it was far too hot to walk any further down...returning instead to the inevitable hot dog snacking before heading over to the Venetian complete with its gondolas down the canals, street performers and opera singing (out-of-work actors) punting people..all of this
naturally located as part of the UNDERGROUND shopping complex far below the normal casino/hotel combi!!yes yes of course!?! A quick soaking from Matt with the fountain outside (mum made the mistake of laughing and was also doused in water..who's laughing NOW!!) then back to treasure Island for Cirque..Mystere. A-MA-ZING!!
Matt ever-the-cynic went on and on about someone falling or going wrong and we assured him it wasn't likely to happen and we in all the other shows had not seen any errors..low and behold someone missed their spot when trying to jump on the shoulders of his mate.. however i think he can be forgiven as said target shoulders were at the top of 3 other people stacked up!! (they did it the 2nd time).
Following the show we were pretty wiped from the day and the previous day's drive so we decided to hit the sack ready for our excursions the following day.
Navigating away from the strip we went for a bit of geography and headed for a tour of the Hoover Dam.. Pretty large consturction it has to be said..they gave us silly yellow hats to wear so we could really feel part of the experience
and our guide was MEGA enthusiastic even when one of the snap-happy chinese members of our group decided to get left behind.. (its ok though he was only about 20 floors below taking photo's of a pipe) We saw parts of the big pipes, the turbines and generators in the power plant, a vent in the side of the dam (pretty high up!) and views from the top too. I'd love to say more about the dam itself but i'm not sure what would interest you..
It was built in small blocks of concrete a block at a time so the concrete would have time to set, and pipes of cold water went through the blocks to speed up the process..it powers a suprisingly small part of the USA which is weird when you are there because it is so big itself but i suppose i am possibly a little naieve with all this sciencey stuff..?!
The afternoon naturally the inevitable shopping mall was located and a happy couple of hours spent perusing and trying on and (in matt's case) buying wares for our onward journey!
Once again we strapped mum into the drivers seat and headed to that
big old hole in the ground known to most as the Grand Canyon! Naturally mum had a bit of a ribbing and lot's of 'rock' jokes but all "it's just a big hole in the ground" jokes aside it was pretty spectacular. The clouds move pretty rapidly so the colours of all the different layers of rock change frequently which makes some sight to behold thats for sure.. you can't really grasp to vastness of it though apart from to say..having seen how HUGE the Colorado river is at the dam..and then to literally not be able to see more than a few shimmering gaps of it from our vantage point at the top..it's pretty damn big! The silence of the place is something else that really struck me..i felt like i should yell at the top of my voice but got the feeling that it would just get lost in the expanse (that and id've got some superbly odd looks from the other tourists!) Matt played chicken with the law and fed a very friendly squirrell most of his apple..basically just to see how close it would come..very! (it was AFTER this that we saw the signs forbidding this
and the part about it being an arrestable offence-ah well!) Unfortunately we weren't able to stay for the sunset as we had to make the drive back but i can imagine it would have been even more breathtaking than during the day. (one trip on the future itinerary is deffo rafting the river!!looks awesomeeeeee!!)
Our final day in Vegas began in New York.. (get your head around THAT!) another mooch around the casino before hot-footing it over to the famous MGM for a look at the lions and several exclamations of "we're in THE MGM grand...!!" and finding out of course (sorry if you didn't know already-WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN) that Michael Jackson had died..however..after a quick trip to the giant Pyramid of the Luxor hotel and a quick scaling of a couple of egyptian statues we walked down the strip to see an MJ inpersonator outside one of the bars..very respectful naturally! lol. Finally we drove to Stratosphere and frogmarched mum to the ticket desk (not really-she came willingly..sort of!) lucky for her one of the rides was shut due to high winds-it did look the scariest actually but we went on the other 2 and she shrieked
her way back to solid ground very well-go mum! we stayed on the viewing platform to wait for sunset and watched the lights come on gradually down the strip. I was struck by how barren and run-down everything looked in a way i was expecting it to be much more...classy!?! (not sure if that's really what i expected but it's all i can think of right now)
We headed to the Mirage to watch the nightly erruption of their volcano-very special effects actually lots of smoke and fire and noise and lights-it was almost believeable, followed by of course the famous Bellagio fountains show which was..as anticipated very very good! Matt played the black jack tables inside the Bellagio (braver than mum or i who were very intimidated by everything except the slot machines...!) and managed a full 5 minutes before he lost all his chips..but he looked very cool i have to say!!!
Vegas on the whole was pretty cool, Matt really enjoyed it but i was a little..under-whelmed by the end of it..i think if you had a lot of money it would be a very dangerous place to be in although it is a very entertaining
place full of interesting things to say and do but if you don't like tacky it maybe isn't your cup of tea!! (cocktail perhaps!!) ah well Viva Las Vegas..!
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