Las Vegas - July 11th to 13th

After Trestles we headed on the 5 or so hour drive to Las Vegas, after booking ourselves a cheap motel for the next couple of nights – they are so cheap! Apart from the weekends, you can easily pick up a quality motel room for under $50 a night!

So Vegas was in some ways exactly what we’d expected, and in others completely different… We definitely didn’t stand out as tourists – there were heaps and heaps of families there, including lots of little kids, as well as a whole bunch of pre-wedding weekend getaways etc (and I imagine some fairly serious gamblers too).

There’s a lot to see in Vegas – although the city is pretty big, it’s mainly the one (very long) street though! Which is absolutely chocablock with restaurants of all different varieties and prices, so lots of food to be tried! In most of the casinos there are different displays to check out for free, as well as different exhibits to pay for (except we didn’t see any of those…), just by walking through. Most of the big casinos cover a big part or a whole city block, and have a certain theme, such as New York New York, Excalibur (King Arthur etc), Luxor (ancient Egypt), Paris, Caesar’s Palace, The Venetian (picture indoor canals with gondolas) etc, or just plain glamour or class like the Bellagio or MGM Grand inside – LOTs of money here.

On the way to Las Vegas...

First sight of the glitz and glamour

The Stratosphere tower

Gondolas in the canals inside the Venetian casino at night (with painted blue sky ceilings)

Inside all of the casinos...

Inside New York New York casino, with mini skyscrapers with fire escapes etc 

Mini Arc de Triomphe at the Paris casino

Dancing fountains at the half hourly show in front of the Bellagio casino

Glass flowers in the roof at part of the Bellagio casino, by Chahuli (same as the garden in Seattle)

There are a massive amount of shows held daily around the city in the different casinos, like a few different Cirque du Soleil shows, concerts by different singers, musicals, magic shows, and all sorts of others. We’d heard that the Cirque du Soleil shows here were amazing, but we also heard that David Copperfield (the world’s greatest illusionist) was here, so we booked some tickets to that – WOW!  Again, if you ever get a chance to see a show of his, GO! Even his simplest illusions/tricks were incredible and we simply cannot work out how any of them are even slightly possible! First he arrived on a motorbike in a big box we’d already seen through, above the ground with cameras from all sides, and he popped a balloon inside another balloon from a distance (in the middle of the audience rather than on stage, getting people to check the balloons were normal first). He made a ball of tissue paper levitate and dance without touching it (???!!) and helped a girl from the audience do the same, and then made the paper into a rose, which somehow turned into a real rose. Ditto a butterfly, which then flew away, and a duck/goose disappeared and appeared again a few metres away in a bucket a guy from the audience was holding.

All of his ‘volunteers’ from the audience were proven to be random people, chosen by bouncing big balls into the audience to catch, or random marks on the wristbands that were handed around at the start. Somehow he made a car appear out of nowhere, on top of 2 poles held by audience members, again with cameras everywhere (how???!), and made a randomly selected word (by a member of the audience, blindfolded, out of 100 different words) appear in infrared light on every single person’s wristband (which was given to us before the word was chosen). And finally (among many other amazing/impossible things, he made 13 people from the audience disappear (while on a platform suspended in mid-air of course, so we could see under and over and to the sides and front, with audience members stationed to watch behind as well), and reappear way over in the audience – would have been awesome to feature in that one, but no such luck!

Annnd that was Las Vegas for us – somewhat different to a lot of people’s experience I imagine! J