Full day in Vegas

Hi everyone, (adding photos later)

Our first full day started off around 4 am when my son decided he was no longer tired. Dammit.  I talked him back to sleep – or rather I talked to him until I fell back to sleep.  He woke me up again several more times until I gave in and told him to play with his Dsi in the bathroom. Ugh…

Remember when I mentioned we’re not buffet people?  Well we are coupon people and we had coupons for the buffet – kids eat free – so we forced ourselves to get in line with the sea of humanity streaming into the buffet and grabbed some plates. The buffet was pretty good although they didn’t have any strawberries in the fruit section.  Who doesn’t have strawberries in the fruit section?  Isn’t there some unwritten law that all buffets should have strawberries?  Other than that we all liked it!

After that came Wal-mart. Oy. I do have to say that the Wal-mart on Charleston Blvd is very impressive.  It’s very clean, the people are extremely helpful and they all understand and speak English fluently unlike the crappy Wal-mart where I live where you could have a heart attack and die in the middle of the store and no one would help/notice/or be able to understand your pleas for an ambulance.

The site to store method worked like a charm.  Everything I ordered was there and Jill, my amazing Wal-mart helper, brought it all out for me, did all the paperwork and even took care of two returns when we realized we only needed one cooler instead of two and 6 pillows instead of 8. But holy cow, it’s a good thing we got the bigger SUV.  It is filled to the gills with all our stuff.  Poor Dan can’t see out the back window.  We keep praying we won’t hit anyone.

We got almost everything else we needed, too, but we held off on the food. We decided to wait until tomorrow or Tuesday.  There isn’t a lot of room and we’re worried we can’t keep the food cool enough. I have to say, this whole camping thing is starting to feel overwhelming.  I hope we haven’t bit off more than we can chew.  I guess we’ll see…..

Next we hit the strip and walked through The Venetian and Caesar’s.  OMG, you’ve never seen anything like these places.  They both have these huge, very upscale “malls” for lack of a better word inside of them.  The architecture is over the top with sculptures, fountains, and ceilings that look like the sky and change the time of day every 30 minutes or so. The highlights were seeing the gondolas in The Venetian and the circular escalators in Caesar’s.  We walked so much our feet, calves and tushies were sore.

Once again we didn’t dine at the specified location.  Gilly’s was in Treasure Island where our show was but they had a lot of young women in skimpy clothing getting ready to ride a mechanical bull.  While my husband found this exciting, the rest of us did not and we chose to go to Kahunaville instead  - mainly because we had a coupon for this place.  It’s a Caribbean-style joint also in Treasure Island.  The food was good enough and the prices are what I’d expect from a “moderately priced” restaurant in a Las Vegas hotel/casino.  I ordered the coconut shrimp special and it came on wooden skewers sticking out of a pineapple top.  Pretty cool.  The kids shared a Hibachi shrimp and chicken dinner.  I’m so proud of them.  The kids menu had 4 crappy things on it and when I suggested they share an adult meal, they jumped at the chance.  No chicken fingers or mac and cheese for my little foodies.

The best part of our day was the Cirque de Soleil Mystere production we saw this evening.  It was absolutely incredible and a great choice for the kids. The show was funny and the acrobatic feats were beyond description. What these performers can do with their bodies defies explanation. While the story line was perplexing, it didn’t matter. The sheer entertainment made that unimportant.  If you are with your children and looking for a show, we all recommend Mystere whole heartedly.

Tomorrow we leave the comforts of air conditioning, electricity and real beds and head for the canyons.  Wish us luck!