Birthday Weekend @ Las Vegas

Happy Birthday Yeesin! Actually, this past weekend had me posting bits and pieces of this Blog from our Las Vegas Caesar's Palace room while waiting for Yeesin to gets out on break from her week long class over here. Basically, I played tag along this weekend since she had a class here and it was also her birthday weekend.

Flying in took longer than expected, rain storms hitting Las Vegas. Raining in the desert is kinda like Snow in Texas.... it screwed up traffic, on the ground AND in the air. So, we had to sit in Denver for a 4 hr delay while Las Vegas airport was shut down to just one runway for the rains.... Still, the delays were long enough to make the rest of the night more exciting! We had tickets to Zumanity at 10.30pm, but we landed at 9pm. Yeesin was chatting with a guy in the next aisle and managed to score us a limousine ride to the hotel to save us some time....


9.45pm, arrived at the hotel, standing in line to check in. Funny how you never seem to get a short line when you're going to be late for something? 10.00pm, finally get our room key, but discover that the room is like 10 minutes walk away from the reception desk. BTW, we forgot how huge these Vegas hotels are. 10.21pm, finally at the Taxi stand, got a cab and off to New York New York hotel. 10.28pm, at the WILL CALL line got our Tickets! PHEW!!! 10.30pm sharp! in our seats, in the 2nd row in front of the stage. SWEET! Guess if we missed the show we would be so kicking ourselves.... 11pm halfway through the show, we notice people still coming in late, and taking their time to get to their seats... So much for the drama earlier. Note to self, next time we can take it easy to get to any Vegas shows, apparently they don't take their mandatory attendance 1 hr BEFORE the show very seriously!



Its been 4 years since we've been to Vegas, so I forgot how good the casinos are at taking your money. With the flashy blinking lights, and the happy sounding "ding ding ding", the siren call of the machines just lull you into playing them. $5 basically lasts about 5 minutes if you're not careful. We watched while YS's co-worker started with $20 in a penny machine, and after a couple of wins, got sucked to into betting higher, and was up $100 after only 10 minutes! After that peak though, @ $3.00s per bet, she was in danger of losing it all. Luckily she had a system where she took out her winnings and put a portion back into the machine... if not that $100 and the original $20 would have been gone in a flash! Gotta hand it to the Casinos, they are really good at what they do... :)


Penny slots are good for something though, a good way to get comp'ed drinks...While I personnaly didn't have a lucky gene in my entire body, i figured out how to work the system. So, my best business plan was to play $1-2 worth of 1 cent slots, and order any mixed drink that I want, after a $1 tip... VOILA! a $3 drink. AWESOME!



The rest of the weekend, we spent just walking around the rest of the Strip. Not much has changed on the Strip since our last visit here immediately after our wedding, so didn't do much major sightseeing. Did get a chance to stroll by Paris Paris, the Venetian, and the sights around Caesar's Palace, so got to relive some of our Euro vacations from a few years ago. Check out this side by side shot of Venice vs the Venetian! [Hint, the one in Vegas has a casino in the background - The Mirage!]

Sitting @ McClaren, waiting for my plane now. I get back to KC first, while Yeesin gets to hang out in Vegas for a couple more days in Vegas for her class... Happy LV Weekend Yeesin!