Adventures of a Puuurplemonster Abroad: Vegas, baby!!

Last week I finally had my first trip to Las Vegas - woohoo!! Hubby's sister and her fiance were in town so we flew over on Wednesday to catch up with them for a few nights.

I couldn't make up my mind which hotel I wanted to stay in, but a little on line research and some recommendations from friends indicated that the Wynn was the place to be, and they were not wrong!!

From the moment we stepped out of the taxi we were blown away by how awesome the hotel was!!

This picture on the left is the entrance lobby.

Unfortunately I didn't get any photos of our beautiful corner suite as every time I remembered it looked like a hurricane had hit it!! However, Hubby did get this awesome shot of the view from our window ...

Once we had unpacked and freshened up we were off to meet Hubby's sister, Caroline, and her fiance Christopher. We had a wee drink at the bar while we caught up, then went in search of dinner. They suggested we head to the Venetian, and as that was at the top of my To Do list we agreed!

People had told us what to expect at the Venetian, and I had seen pictures before, but nothing prepares you for seeing it in the flesh!!

They have St Mark's Square, the Doge's palace, and gondolas sailing up and down the canals! There were even a couple of bridges we recognised from our trip to the real Venice!

The painted sky was really trippy, and it was quite hard to remember that we were actually indoors!!

It was a magical wee place and we had a good wander round before we settled on - surprise surprise! - an Italian restaurant for dinner.

Next, we ventured on up to the Mirage and stopped off at the Rhumbar for a round of massive frozen margaritas which, although delicious, gave us all brain freeze and we struggled to finish them, I know, I know - there's a first time for everything!! By now we were getting quite tired, and the DJ was quite simply atrocious, so we decided to call it a night and arranged to meet up with Caroline and Christopher the next day at 11am.

Cut to 10.45am and me and him waking up in a panic as we realised we were going to be late! This wouldn't normally be a huge problem, but neither Caroline or Christopher's phones would work in the US, and our only means of communication was Facebook when Caroline found somewhere she could get wifi! We managed to get ready in record time and headed towards the tour booth we had decided on last night.

Cut to the second problem - they had picked the tour booth based on Google maps information, and the booth did not in fact exist any more. We spent a good half an hour or so running back and forward trying to see if they were hanging around before we decided to head back to the hotel and try and leave them a message.

By some miracle we found them just beside our hotel, where they had decided to wait for a bit to see if we would come back. After much rejoicing, we declared it to be time for lunch and headed back to our hotel as Hubby wanted to try the Red 8 restaurant.

The menu offered a selection from various Asian cuisines and i thoroughly enjoyed my Malaysian chicken and shrimp fried rice! C & C enjoyed their meals too, but Hubby was a little disappointed with his laksa :-(

After lunch we decided to explore the hotel and stumbled across a little wine bar, or wine and food hideaway as it called itself, called La Cave. And then the drinking began!! I wont go into full detail of all we did or drank that day as quite frankly, I cant remember!! But here are the highlights!! :-)

I remember stopping off at the encouragingly named Margaritaville, and this time the cocktail did not freeze my insides!

Armed with our happy little plastic cups we set off for the Bellagio.

The fountains at the Bellagio were one of the highlights of our trip. So elegant and beautiful - something else that needs to be seen to fully appreciate! This video really doesn't do them justice! (And yes, that is me squealing in the background ......)

Next we cut through the hotel to get to the monorail that would take us to C & C's hotel and on our way we got to see this exquisite ceiling, made up of 2000 hand blown glass flowers.

Our path took us through their conservatory and botanical garden where we saw bees and birds ......

...... and frogs ........

...... and ladybugs .......

..... and mini hot air balloons!! It was wonderfully fairy tale (and yes, I was rather tipsy at this point ...)

Oh yeah, and they had a chocolate fountain at the cake shop!! :-)

Once I had been pried away from the fountain, we continued on our merry way to New York, New York, where C & C were staying, which was, again, visually spectacular!

I loved walking through the bars and restaurants, all laid out like city streets. I would show you a picture, but unfortunately my margarita consumption had not improved my camera skills so all I have are blurry shots :-(

The boys decided that they wanted a go on the rollercoaster, while the girls decided that we'd rather stick needles in our eyes, so we waited for them at a bar and had another wee glass of wine. *hic!*

C & C then packed up a change of clothes and we returned to our hotel to get ready for dinner.

Hubby had a fancy for steak, so we reserved a table at the SW Steakhouse in our hotel and got our glad rags on!

And once again, the meal was exquisite! Wonderful, perfectly cooked steaks, with fries, potato gratin, and some broccoli so we could at least pretend to be healthy!! ;-)

After dinner we ventured down to the nightclub, which was a very fancy outdoor setting with a river and a waterfall, and some really good music (Swedish House Mafia, if you care) but unfortunately nowhere for me to sit, and that was the point that I decided I may now be too old for clubbing! I would much rather have been sitting comfortably with good company and a nice glass of pinot noir listening to the music than constantly getting bumped out of the way and unable to hear what anyone was saying!! Anyway, old lady rant over! I stuck it out for an hour or so then decided to leave the others to it and head back to the room (with a final glass of prosecco for the road)

I vaguely remember people coming back to the room and rough plans being made for lunchtime the following day, but my next real memory is of the monster hangover I woke up with! Hubby wasn't much better and we lay in bed willing ourselves to get up so we could go meet C & C. We were very relieved when Caroline sent us a message saying that they also felt like death and would be hanging around their pool all day. We agreed to do our own thing and meet for dinner later.

After another hour or so in bed the hunger kicked in and I knew we had to get up. I was craving a burger so we headed to the Palazzo hotel and found an appropriately named I <3 Burgers. It was heaven! Aside from the weird greasy bun, my burger topped with blue cheese and bacon was delicious, and Hubby's bacon-fest (a burger with chopped bacon through it, bacon on top and bacon mayo!) hit the spot.

But nothing could compare to the sheer joy that was my Tahitian vanilla bean milkshake!! :-)

Granted, it did make me a bit sick on top of my hangover and the big ass burger I had polished off, but dear God it was awesome!!

After that we shopped for a bit but I was suffering from milkshake intoxication so we headed back to the hotel to chill for a bit before dinner.

Dinner that night was Caroline's choice, and we went to BB King's Blues Club at the Mirage. My hangover was still demanding lardy food so I had fried chicken with mac and cheese - yummy!! The music was mostly pretty good there, apart from a woman who couldn't sing to save her life and murdered many classics right before our eyes!!

None of us were in a drinking mood so we paid the bill and headed out for the Mirage's hourly volcano display which was fun. We were ready to call it a night, but wanted to catch one last show from the fountains at the Bellagio which was even more spectacular than the day performance! I wish I had captured that one for you, but I was too busy watching and enjoying myself!!

We said our farewells then, and made our way back to the hotel. It was still relatively early (for Vegas, anyway!) but we weren't feeling terribly sociable so we just chilled in the room. Tiesto was playing in the club that night and, as the club was directly below our room, we were able to listen to his set from bed - rock 'n' roll!!!

Sadly, the next day we had to go home :-( We had a couple of hours to kill after we checked out so we went back to La Cave and had some more of their delicious wine and some lunch and sat contentedly til some posh English assholes came in and were .... well .... assholes. We decided to relocate to the bar in the lobby for a last wee drink before we had to drag ourselves to the airport :-(

So that was my first Vegas trip, and I loved it!! There was still so much that we didn't get to see, so I will be looking forward to making a trip back as soon as possible!!

Here are a few other random pics we took: