Vegas Weekend

Cody and I "won" a trip to Las Vegas that we took last weekend. Sin City isn't our favorite place to vacation, it's been 7 years since we last went and that was with my clogging studio, but free is free, right?!! We headed out Friday morning after dropping our kids off with grandparents. We couldn't check in until 4, so we headed to the Las Vegas temple first and did a session. It has one of the most beautiful celestial rooms I've ever seen! We like to joke that we didn't help out Las Vegas that weekend because we started it off with a spiritual activity!

After the temple, we drove to our hotel, which happened to not be on the strip and was a bit ghetto. The reason we won the trip was because we went to one of those time share presentations a year ago and they gave us 2 trips. One to Vegas and our other is to Park City (just think, Cody could walk down the street to work! - Sorry for all of you that like to vacation in Park City, nothing wrong with it, just a bit different when that's where you work!) Anyway, we assumed we'd be staying in one of the timeshare places, since that's what they were trying to sell us. Nope! We stayed in a standard plain hotel. It was fine, we were just spoiled on our trip to Mexico with a really nice hotel.

Part of our trip was supposed to entail some perks, like tickets to a show. We had about 5 options to choose from, but they weren't really free and we knew nothing about them. They all had a minimum drink purchase of one per person at a $9.95 value (hello we don't drink and weren't going to spend $10 each on a coke!) We opted to not go to a show.

We walked the strip that evening and checked out all the free things to do. The Bellagio has this awesome botanical garden and of course their water show.

The next morning we drove to the other end of the strip and went to the MGM Grand to see their lions. The baby cubs were so cute!

We walked around a bit more then went back to our hotel to pick up the shuttle that was taking us to the Jockey Club where we had to sit through another 90 minute presentation on why we should buy their timeshare. BORING! We were also told that we would receive $300 in slot machine money, which we thought was pretty cool, until we found out how it was to be used. We assumed that we'd be able to do the penny or nickel slots and then cash out when we wanted to. Nope, we had to walk over to the Hooters Hotel, turn our vouchers in and then went to a roped off area where we had to play on the $5 machines. You couldn't cash out unless you won the jackpot - and I'm sure you can guess how often that happens. It's crazy, that within a matter of minutes, $300 was gone. It's unbelievable how much money people waste trying to win big.

We walked around some more after our big gambling moment, ate dinner at PF Changs and then headed back to our hotel. We'd both had enough of the billboards, Mexicans passing out nudy cards and the filth that lies all over. It was great to get down south and be around the warmth, it was in the upper 80s while we were there - oh and it was fun to be without the kids for a couple days, but unless you have lots of money to see the good shows and you drink, there just isn't that much to do.