Pictures from our Vegas Vacation

Sarah and I got a free 2-night stay in Las Vegas for test-driving a car and we used it this week to go to the Golden Nugget in downtown Vegas. (If you’re not familiar with the city, most of the fancy new touristy places are further down on the Strip, and the older dumpier hotels are downtown where we stayed.)

We got there Monday afternoon and started with the pool at our hotel. The Shark Tank at the Golden Nugget is an aquarium in the middle of the pool area, so you can swim up to the glass that separates you from the sharks and fish. (There’s even a water slide that goes right through the middle of the aquarium, but it goes pretty fast so you can’t really see the animals when you’re passing through.) We were pretty impressed with that.

After dinner at a cheap diner in one of the nearby resorts, we explored the few casinos and attractions in the Fremont Street area near our hotel. There wasn’t much to hold our attention, so we decided to head to the Strip. We parked at the Excalibur and walked north to the Bellagio and back (a round trip of about 3 miles), exploring anything that caught our fancy in between. The most impressive place we saw that night was the Bellagio, with its really cool indoor garden and sheer opulence. We were very tired when we got back to our car and when we eventually fell into bed.

On Tuesday, we listened to a time-share pitch for a new condo development called GrandView south of the Strip. We realized how much money they must be making when someone does buy, because there were tons of people doing the same thing as us, and tons of employees trying to get all of them hooked into the program. It earned us $75 in food vouchers at our hotel, plus we got catered sub sandwiches for lunch.

After resting at the hotel for a few minutes, we headed back down to the Strip to see the north side that we’d missed the night before. There were lots of free fun things that we wanted to see, like the Sirens at Treasure Island, but missed because we’d have to wait more than an hour until they started. We did like the Venetian hotel with its gondoliers (they had indoor and outdoor canals) and people dressed in white pretending to be marble statues. We volunteered to watch a television show and give our opinion for $10 each, which was a nice way to get off our feet for an hour. At the end of the day, the big toe on my right foot was bleeding because we’d walked so much.

We had dinner at a nice Asian noodle place in our casino, spending almost exactly $50 because our vouchers were only good in $25 increments. Then we went out to get a caricature of ourselves done on Fremont Street. (Sarah justified the $30 cost to me by saying we earned most of it at the TV show earlier in the day.) The artist was a guy in his 20s who looked like he’d done a few too many drugs, but he did a pretty good job — we think he captured my face better than Sarah’s, and he made her attire a bit more risque and bosomy than what she was really wearing.

Today, we visited the Las Vegas temple and ate at the Golden Nugget buffet before heading home. We weren’t too impressed with the quality of the buffet food, but we really liked our hotel. It was easily the nicest place in the downtown Las Vegas area and a million times better than the “First Inn Gold” in York, Nebraska we stayed at during our Wisconsin adventure a few weeks ago.