Day 14 - Casino crawl in Sin City!

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After a fairly late night (by our recent standards) yesterday, we decided that we would have a lie-in today. We woke up at about 9:00am after a less than peaceful night. At about 3:00am in the morning, Craig was woken up by alarmingly loud claps of thunder and flashes of lightning and checked if Emma was awake/had heard it too. She responded sleepily that she had, but had thought she was dreaming it. After watching the news and weather this morning it appears that Nevada - and Las Vegas in particular - had suffered massive thunder storms and rainfall during the night which is very unusual for this area. The storm clouds had even formed into what meteorologists call 'funnel clouds' which are an early part of the formation of a tornado.

Anyway, we took our time getting ready - as we were in no real rush to be anywhere in particular today - and eventually left the hotel at about 11:30am. We figured this was a little late for breakfast and instead decided to have a 'brunch'. We had noticed a food court further down the strip yesterday so hopped on the Deuce bus a couple of stops to check what they had to offer. There was a Subway, Wendy's, Del Taco, Panda Express, an Italian Cuisine restaurant and an icecream parlour. After checking each of their menus, we settled on 'Del Taco' which serves Mexican food (like Taco Bell). Emma chose a burrito combo and Craig had a meal deal that consisted of a medium drink, fries, a soft chicken taco and a spicy chicken burrito.

After eating, Emma suggested that since we were so close to the MGM Grand already, we should look inside at the lion enclosure. As we got there, we could see that the trainers were inside the glass with the lions, trying to get them to play with huge plastic balls like regular cats. At first it appeared that they were far to tired (or just plain lazy) to get up and actually chase the balls, instead they were half-heartedly prodding the balls whilst lying down whenever it came near. Occasionally, they would actually get up and properly chase the balls before quickly lying back down again to recover! We took a few pictures and videos and then looked around the casino for a while.

We spent about half an hour in the casino, having a couple of goes on some of the cheaper machines, before spotting a 'Deal or no Deal' machine that was different from the other slot machines. It was basically like the real game, where you picked your box before eliminating the others, receiving offers from the banker throughout. After a couple of goes, we soon realised that a $1 bet would turn into an average of $6 on the banker's very first offer, and we ended up easily turning $2 into just under $11 in a very short amount of time. We ended up spending a lot of the day searching for more of these machines throughout the other casinos but unfortunately couldn't find anymore of them 😞

Once we were done at the casino, we started to make our way out of the MGM Grand, but noticed a big crowd of people around a boxing ring, which contained a few people with cameras/microphones surrounding a guy. We got a bit closer and realised that the Mayweather/Ortiz fight that we had seen advertised on TV was going to be at the MGM on Saturday night, and Ortiz was having some sort of pre-fight interview there. We took the best pictures that we could with the limited view that we had, then went back out onto the strip to look at some of the nearby shops.

We went into the M&Ms store and looked at some of the merchandise that they sold, and to drool over the WALL of M&Ms (this is basically one huge wall on the second floor that is literally, floor to ceiling, end to end, covered in massive tubes full of M&M's, separated into different colours). There was a lady offering free samples of new coconut flavour M&Ms, so we each had a handful, although Craig didn't really like them, so gave them to Emma (who thought they were yummy!). As we left the store, we noticed a person dressed as an M&M, and Emma got a picture with them, attempting to take a bite out of it!

We moved on to the coca-cola store, which (obviously) was full of coca-cola merchandise! We had a look around and spotted the coca-cola polar bear, and got a picture with him. They also took a photo with one of their own cameras (as there was a green screen behind it) and on the second picture that they took, the bear messed up Emma's hair and attempted to bite Craig's head! Unfortunately, although the photo was quite funny, it cost about $20 to buy, so we just settled for the one that we had on our own camera.

We then went into what we thought was a games store, called 'Game Works', but it turned out to be a huge underground amusement arcade. We had a quick look around the games, but it seemed that they all required some sort of tokens to play them. We didn't really want to buy any of these, so we headed back up to the surface, with Craig posing for a photo in a 'Super Sonic' hat and gloves.

We carried on up the strip, stopping to pose on a bike outside the Harley Davidson cafe (and taking a sneaky picture of a bride in her wedding dress on there!), and went into a few more of the hotels and casinos, such as the Bellagio, Caesar's Palace, Planet Hollywood and Flamingo's. We took a few photos at the flamingo habitat inside the hotel (which were just standing around on one leg, as flamingos do!). By this point, it was about 5:30pm, and we had been walking around for hours, so as we were close to our hotel, we made a stop off at our room for a short break.

After having a rest for about an hour and a half, we were ready for another stint on the strip. At this point we were pretty hungry - we also needed to update the blog for yesterday - so went to McDonald's to leech off their wifi whilst we ate. We split a 20pc Chicken McNugget thing and some fries, and Craig also had a double cheeseburger. We did all we needed to do on the internet (such as check Facebook, e-mails etc.), then basically continued our casino crawl from earlier.

We went into The Venetian, which is modelled like the canals of Venice on the inside (complete with Gondolas and singing Gondoliers). Whilst inside the casino, Craig decided that he would have a go on one of the more 'real' games (as opposed to slots and fruit machines). We can't remember exactly what it was called, but it was basically a big wheel split into loads of segments numbered 1, 2, 5, 10, 20 and 40. The numbers ranged from common (1's were every other number), to rare (there were only two 40's on the wheel) and your odds of winning on each number decreased respectively. Craig changed $5 into $1 chips and bet $2 on 2, $2 on 10 and $1 on 20. The woman spun the wheel which eventually landed on 10 (JUST about), with the odds at 10:1 that meant the $2 we'd put on 10 turned into $22! Get in!

We decided to quit while we were ahead (we had actually only spent a couple of dollars each throughout the whole day!), and left the Venetian. We had a wander over to Treasure Island to have a look around, but we had just missed the pirate ship show that occurs outside every 90 minutes or so, so decided that we would go back to see that on a different night. We walked a little bit further to the 'Fashion Show' (basically a big shopping mall), but found that it was all closed. It was around 11:30pm by this point and we were starting to get tired, so we caught the Deuce bus back to our hotel.

We put the TV on and watched the film 'The Bank Job' before finally going to sleep at around 1:30am, ready for another long day checking out the sights of Las Vegas tomorrow!

By the way, we still can't upload any photo's due to slow internet connection, so we will do a separate blog entry just for all of the photo's that we have taken in Vegas. This will probably appear some time next week, when we're back in Hollywood.

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