Viva Las Vegas!

Michael and I have been planning a Vegas trip since we moved here almost 4 years ago. The plane tickets are pretty inexpensive, as are the hotel rooms. We left last Wednesday at 7:00pm and got home Saturday around noon. It was awesome! There is so much to do there and always lots going on.
And Olivia? No worries, between the mall:



Chuck E. Cheese:



The Wildlife Experience:



Gymnastics:



and a variety of other kid-friendly activities, I don't think she even noticed we were gone, ha! Thanks so much Mom and Lilo for taking such good care of our girl!

We stayed at the Flamingo:





Our room is somewhere in this tower:



Not the nicest place in Vegas (which we couldn't afford, anyway!), but the location is great! It is right across from Caesar's Palace and Bellagio. Wednesday night, we wandered around close to our hotel and watched the fountains at The Bellagio:





We're cracking up in that picture, because a friend of the man that took our picture kept pretending that he was going to get in it with us. He actually managed to get in one!


Thursday, we headed to the Northern part of the strip, basically stopping and checking out the other hotels/casinos. They are unbelievable.
Gondolas in the Venetian:



This is the walkway from our hotel to Bally's (with the Eiffel Tower in the background). Vegas has many walkways over roads to cut down on pedestrian traffic.



That night we went to a Hypnotist/Comedy show that was really good.

Friday, we headed to the south end of the strip.

New York New York:



The lion habitat in the MGM Grand. The trainers were playing with the lions while we were there:



The view up the strip:



Vegas equals lots of walking! Everything looks close together, but it's not. The resorts are huge, so just walking from one to another can take 15-20 minutes. There is a bus that goes up and down the strip and downtown. It's $7 for 24 hours, so after we had been in most of the casinos on the south end, we hopped on the bus to check out downtown. We had heard that the slot machines downtown were "looser" and since we hadn't had any luck so far, we decided to check it out. Downtown Vegas has been revamped recently with the Fremont Street experience. The entire street is covered with a canopy. It looks like this during the day:



And this at night:



Very neat. Every hour or so, the casinos turn out all their lights for a light show on the canopy:



We were downtown for quite some time. We started off playing a few slot machines, but had no luck. We had just thrown in the hat on gambling, when we spotted a $5 craps table. Michael had played craps before, but I hadn't. We watched for a little bit, then decided to try it. We put in $30. 6 hours later, we had won back everything we lost on the trip! There was a couple beside us that had been helping us and they kept telling us to not think it's always like this, it's easy to lose money, too! We just picked a hot table and everyone was winning. We kept putting money back a little at a time in a "don't touch this" pile. It kept growing. We skipped dinner and another show, but it's so much fun when you're winning! Definitely made us feel better about the vacation, ha! We rode the bus back to our hotel and crashed. Our flight left at 7:30am, so we had to get up pretty early!

Our room:



The mirror in the bathroom had a TV built into it:



The view from our room:



I wish we had one more day to explore, there's so much to see! Just gives us another reason for a return trip, I guess!
Here's a short video of the fountains at The Bellagio. Very cool: