Las Vegas TO Tucamcari, New Mexico

Day 9 ? Friday April 17th, 2009


Amusingly enough the most high class place we've stayed yet and we didn't have internet - except it was because it cost $14 a day and it really didn't seem worth the money. Hopefully we'll be good tonight in some cheap hotel in New Mexico.

Tuesday night we drove into a pre-chosen but also slightly random town in California and found a place to sleep for the night. We had breakfast for dinner at a place that was across the parking lot, but service was terrible. It took at least 40 minutes to get our food and we were starving by that point because we hadn't eaten for a while that day. Checked the car oil and stuff in the morning and headed off to Vegas for our shortest drive yet, only about 5 hours. There was a crazy amount of construction to drive through going in to the city and we couldn't seem to find the Welcome to Vegas sign, but once we got ourselves situated we checked in with my parents and crashed for a little bit. A couple showers, a short walk around a few hotels and dinner later we took a taxi down to Freemont Street.

Las Vegas essentially has two sections - the Strip and Freemont Street. They're about 6 miles apart and sort of very different worlds with similar elements. The Vegas Strip is all the casino/hotel's you've heard about - Bellagio, Monte Carlo, Luxor (the pyramid), etc. it's a bit classy in parts and trashy in others, but that's Vegas. Freemont Street is Old Vegas - the Golden Nugget is one of the main casino hotels there and everything is neon and bright. What makes it seem brighter than the strip is that they put a half tunnel across the top of Freemont Street covered to the brim with LED Lights. Every hour or half hour they have shows on this giant screen above the street. That night they played Don Mclean's American Pie and illustrated it with photographs and illustrations and dancing girls. Later they had a tribute to Queen which wasn't quite as impressive, but was still cool. The last time I was in Vegas they had this weird animated Alien thing. The aliens were like looking down on you with their experiemental tools and stuff. It's really a cool experience no matter what they're showing.

Back at the strip we crashed for the night. We were up at a decent hour and went walking down the strip and in and out of more hotels. Hit up shopping centers in Planet Hollywood and Caesars and had an amazing lunch at a restaurant called Serendipity 3 in the courtyard at Caesars. We must have walked a few miles in just the morning, so we took a break and hit the pool at our hotel which felt really really good until you got OUT of the water and then the wind hit you. At the Venetian I bought a mask from Venice that I had wanted to buy the last time I was here and it's beautiful. It's one of the smaller ones that I could afford, but it'll look great hanging. Next we saw Sigfried and Roy's Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat at the Mirage. The animals were beautiful but I couldn't help notice that they were in very small spaces and the cats were pacing a lot. It made me a bit sad. There's so much space behind all these hotels, I feel like they could have given these animals a lot more space.

Finally, what I've been waiting for for probably a year now - we went to see the Cirque du Soliel Beatle's show LOVE. The theater was in the round and incredibly small - all the seats were great no matter where you were. Everything was amazing. The sets and costumes were so incredible and detailed. The acrobatics were amazing - a lot of aeriel work as well as roller blading and awesome awesome use of trampolines. The songs were beautifully interpreted and I was singing and dancing the whole show on the edge of my seat. Favorite bits include these little kids wearing blank face heads with mop tops and the 1964 suits, also pulling a huge sheet of white fabric over almost the entire audience and shaking it so that the bed at on top looked like it was floating on the clouds. Simple dancing and aerial work with the help of a ladder attached to a giant wheel during Lucy in the SKy - when they could have done a lot of visuals they stayed simple it was good. They also had characters for Eleanor Rigby, Father Mckenzie and Lady Madonna that were featured and also on stage at other points. During Lady Madonna there was a cool video of rain boots dancing in the rain. And the people on stage had TAP DANCE YELLOW RAIN BOOTS. .. they were awesome. Everything was amazing and made me so so happy. It was too short.

We saw the Bellagio fountain show twice - once during the day to "Lady Luck" and then again at night to "Viva Las Vegas". I love watching that - it's always fun. We tried to find fuzzy dice to add to the mirror after Vegas, but the only ones we could find were too big. We got a small keychain with dice in it instead and it's hanging with my crystal currently.

Today we started out from Las Vegas and saw the Welcome to sign... well, the thanks for coming part anyway, and i got a photo of the welcome part through the back window as we passed. We noticed somewhere in Arizona that our camera had stopped working, so we pulled off the highway - and as fortune would have it landed at the Route 66 Museum! I bought postcards and Matt bought a travel mug and we both chatted with the older gentleman manning the museum in the middle of nowhere. It was awesome.

Back on route, we're still driving through Arizona towards New Mexico.

-- Hit a bitty snowstorm in the upper elevations of New Mexico, of course just when I needed to get out adn get gas. But we got here okay and the room is really nice so we're going to figure out tomorrow and crash for the night.

Signing off till next internet time :)