And the Winner IS...............

We made it back home. Take it from me: Las Vegas in August is NOT the where you want to be. It was hot! It was %*&@! hot!! And for those of us who live in higher elevations, the heat is PAINFUL! So here's how it went. We landed just before midnight and I was the typical tourist. I was holding up foot traffic in the airport trying to see everything. (And by everything, I mean advertisements of who was performing in Vegas now and who will be. I was the one you've always wanted to slap or push out of the way. Then we went outside and I was done! "Please tell me it won't be this hot the entire time we're here. I feel like I have died and gone to HELL!" My hubby said, "No tomorrow in the daylight will be much hotter!" I knew I was in for a treat. So from that moment until we stepped off our plane on our return trip to Colorado Springs I lived for one spritzing fan to the next and one air conditioned building to the next. I'm a quick learner. I loved the monorail. I could have just ridden the monorail for 4 days and been happy. Just get off once in a while and buy a bottle of water and get back on the rail.

The best thing was the Fremont Street Experience. But don't go in the daytime. Go at night and watch the tribute to Queen. It was amazing. And I won a bundle at the Golden Nugget. I sat myself right down at a slot machine, put in my big $5.00 bill and VOILA! I hit the 7s on all the rows and scored a big 1,376. That's pennies for all of you big time gamblers out there. That's right! $13.76 plus my $5 so I more than tripled my money. Yeah, that's right. I'm the last of the big time spenders. Then I sat down next to Don at a slot machine he was feeding and started playing one that was called "Menopause". Can you believe that? A slot machine all about the change of life. Instead of lucky 7s there was the sign for female. Instead of cherries or some other fruit, we got a picture of a guy, who when you got three in a row of his mug said, "I'm Dr. Love." (UGH!) Instead of the normal slot figures we had baseball bats (I wonder if that was for beating your husband), a bottle of aspirin and I women obviously in the state of distress. What I want to know is, where was the air conditioner, the box of chocolates, and the estrogen?!? It was.....no, it wasn't! And that's all I have to say about that. We then went back out into the heat until the next time we felt the need to sit for awhile in the air conditioning. (We only played slots whenever we needed to cool off, so we basically played slots in every casino on the strip and downtown Las Vegas. And we're the casinos favorite kind of gambler, too. We don't smoke or drink so there's nothing to distract us. You could see it in the cocktail waitresses faces: "Great! A nondrinker! They know when they're losing!"

There was a man playing saxophone on Fremont Street who was actually very good except for some of the notes he played..well, let's just say some of those were sounds only dogs should hear. Somewhere in the background I could hear the yowling of some lone coyote begging him to take the pitch down a notch.

On the way back to the hotel on the Deuce (the double decker city buses) Don asked me why I had a choke hold on my purse. He said, "Babe, really! It's leather. The cow's already dead!" "But, Honey, the bus driver said on the way here to watch out for pick pockets. Do you know what's in your wallet?"
When he thought I wasn't looking he checked out his wallet. (It'll just be our little secret that we've discussed this when he wasn't around.)

The first night we were there we walked down to Circus Circus and had dinner in their 24 hr cafe. GOOD FOOD! I mean, REALLY GOOD! And not so expensive. We are vegetarians so sometimes it's hard for us to eat out. The wait staff is always very quick to tell us we can have a salad or a baked potato. (Just between us, I have scratched off salad and baked potatoes from my list of favorite foods now.) I ordered a fruit plate that came with banana bread and my choice of either yogurt, cottage cheese or sherbet. Now, quite honestly, I expected it to be a small dish. So nothing really could have disappointed me except maybe if they dropped it on the floor. So when the waiter brought out this HUGE PLATTER (not plate...it was a platter) of fruit my mouth dropped and I said, "Is that all for me?" There was fresh grapes still on their stalk and they took up about a quarter of the platter, half of a fresh pineapple, watermelon, honeydew, and cantaloupe and a large unpeeled banana right on top of it all. Then he put down the cottage cheese in the bowl that was about the size of a cereal bowl. And the banana bread? Well, let's just say it was a muffin that took up the entire bread plate that it was on. I ate about 1/3 of the fruit and cottage cheese and wrapped up the bread and took it and the rest of the fruit back to our room and ate on it for about 2 days after that. It was amazing. Oh, and the price? $9.95. Yep, that's what I said! So the waiter brought me a big old grocery bag to carry it all back to the hotel. I looked like I had been to the market. Well, I guess I sort of had been. That was the best meal I had the entire time we were gone. No, I suppose that really isn't true. We ate at P.F. Chang's Sunday night and the vegetarian lettuce wraps were to DIE for!

Now, I read somewhere that one should NEVER, I repeat, NEVER take anything offered to you by anyone on the strip. Having said that, there were these guys all up and down the strip handing out what looked like business cards. Now, you don't have to be Einstein to figure out what it was! You could see the same business cards all over the sidewalk. SMUT! Naked ladies! Yeah! I don't need to draw a picture. So there was this elderly couple walking down the street and one of those guys hands him a card and we started to laugh. There were two ladies behind us and one of them said, "Ok, so she's going to knock the crap out of him when they get to their room." We all laughed and laughed. Honestly, though, these guys need to get a REAL job. On the other side of things, however, it isn't call Sin City for nothing!

I need to download my pictures so I'll check back in when that's done.