Vegas, Baby!

We took advantage of Clay's mom's willingness to come watch our kids for a weekend and headed out to play in Las Vegas for the weekend! It was so much fun to go play and have fun together, just the two of us. Usually, my blog posts feature lots of pictures of Zane and Leila, a few pictures of Clay, and the rare picture of myself. We are bucking tradition with this post... it's full of self-portraits of me and Clay and not much else! I love that Clay humors me in my quest to document our lives through pictures... even if my big camera didn't make an appearance the whole weekend. Gotta love having a phone handy!

We got to Las Vegas Thursday afternoon, checked into our hotel, and headed right out to play. The first thing we did was hop on a gondola ride in the Venetian. Although we didn't pay for a private ride, we ended up alone in our boat with our gondolier, Teodoro. He was awesome! He was an incredible singer, was hilarious, and made the whole experience so great. The next day, we were passing through the Venetian on the way to somewhere else and we happened to see him in on a boat about to start serenading his boat. We happened to catch his eye and he started waving like mad. It was fun that he recognized us.

We continued on to TI and the pirate show. D-U-M-B. The show was cheezy and silly and the explosions were HOT! It was already a hot night, and adding fire made it almost unbearable. But we had fun anyway.

We enjoyed our many dessert options at our dinner buffet. I'm pretty sure Clay went back for thirds or fourths of that flan and at least seconds of the chocolate thing. I loved the chocolate raspberry tart in the middle. Yummy!

 

It was so weird being able to stay up late, sleep in, then go to a pool and actually be able to just lounge on the side and not be worried about the drowning prevention and occupying of little ones. I actually got to read a few pages of a book. Unlike the pools here in Phoenix, our hotel pool was freezing. Even Clay was shivering after just a few minutes in the water. It was pretty nice to actually be able to cool down in the water before going back out to the hot pool deck. 

Hands down, our very most favorite place to eat was Serendipity III.  I loved the ceiling. I'm weird, huh? Our food was so good. 

 The company was great.

 And our double frozen hot chocolate at the end of lunch was every bit as good as I had heard.

I could easily have one every day for the rest of my life. Probably not the best idea, but I could put it away nonetheless. 

After going back and changing for our show, we wandered through the Palazzo on the way to the Wynn.  We caught the weird street performers doing their thing. Do you see those two leafy things over Clay's shoulder that look like tall, skinny shrubs? Those are people on stilts dancing.

A nice lady passed by and saw us taking our own pictures. She came and took the phone out of my hand and took a nice one of us. It is only one from our weekend that we didn't take ourselves. This picture makes me laugh. Clay is 13 inches taller than me. He has to scrunch down so far to put his face next to mine. I love him. 

After hearing great things and based on recommendations from several friends, we decided to go see La Reve. We were technically in the "splash zone" in the second row but never got wet. The show was incredible. Both of us were spellbound the entire time. I loved that they encouraged the use of non-flash photography. If I had brought my regular camera with my, I could have gotten some pretty awesome pictures. The phone pictures will have to do. The whole show takes place in a giant pool with a platform that raised and lowered, and up in the air. It was amazing that at some points, the performers were pretty much walking on the surface of the water, then at other times they were literally high diving from the ceiling, probably over 40 feet in the air into the pool.

The performers were crazy strong.  And flexible. And talented. And amazing.

Throughout the whole show, I kept wondering how one goes about training to be in one of these shows. They don't have to be incredible acrobats, they have to be amazing swimmers. 

At the end of the show, Clay commented that he wouldn't mind seeing it again and that he would really like to go see other similar shows. I think that's a pretty strong stamp of approval right there!

Saturday, we headed to Mandalay Bay and played a bit at the Shark Reef Aquarium. Our favorite part was the shark tank. There were several different species of sharks. The coolest shark was the sawshark. I've never seen one of those before.

Zane loves jellyfish so we had to take a picture with some and send it to him. 


 After the aquarium, we headed to the Luxor and took in the Titanic exhibit. That was amazing. I wish that I could have taken pictures inside. They gave us each a boarding pass at the beginning of the exhibit that had the name of and information about a person who was on the Titanic. Clay was a Montana rancher in second class. I was a first-class wife traveling with her two small children, husband, and house staff.  At the end of the tour, we were able to look for our names and learn if the people whose tickets we had survived.  Sadly, Clay's rancher died. My lady and her whole family died, except for the 1-year-old son. I'm not sure how that happened. Overall, it was a great experience.

After the Titanic, we went to the MGM and did the CSI Experience. No pictures were allowed in this experience either. This was one of my favorite activities of the weekend. We got to investigate a crime scene, collect evidence, then process the evidence in a forensics lab. We submitted our results to the supervisor and solved the case successfully!
Funny non-relevant story: When we were submitting our results in the computer lab at the end of the experience, two girls (probably in their late teens or early twenties) came out and handed their clipboards over to the guy working. Apparently they "didn't get it" and despite going back in for a third time to try and figure it out, "it just didn't make sense". It really wasn't that complicated or obscure, but apparently it just wasn't their thing and they gave up. It looked like they were just looking for something to pass the time before the clubs opened. Clay and I found the whole situation pretty entertaining.  

After CSI, we went to the M&M store and watched their fun 3D movie. Don't we make this look good?

We ended our weekend with a Broadway revue. I promise Clay picked this one. I suggested Recycled Percussion, but he picked this one. We were the youngest people in the audience by at least twenty years. It was a fun show. It was nice to kick our feet up and relax a bit after a full day on the go.

We sure packed a lot into our weekend. It was fun being able to spend time with just the handsome man that I married. I am such a lucky girl to be able to spend forever with my very best friend and the person that I have the most fun doing anything and everything with! I can't wait until we can get another little weekend away!