Vegas Trip

Whew it has been a whirlwind Christmas vacation so far. I'll have to blog about the rest later. We went to Vegas Dec 20th to 23rd and we had a blast. We are pretty conservative so I was concerned about how we were going to like Vegas. It was a lot milder than I thought (except for the hooker cards...if you have been there you know what I am talking about) and we loved it. It was so nice to have a few days away as a couple. Hopefully, we can do better about it in the future and not wait so long in between.
Dustin took this picture from the plane. I loved that the mountains are in the background everywhere, something we miss here in Texas.

We stayed at the Monte Carlo. It has a great location and is right on the strip. It was a very nice hotel for the price, and I wouldn't mind staying there again. It was right next door to New York New York, which has a really cool ESPN Zone with over a 100 HD TVs, our little booth even had it's own tv.

We went to Siegfried and Roy's Secret Garden and they had dolphins, including a 7 month old baby. They also had lions, tigers, and black panthers. Funny story: they are only enclosed by fencing, no glass. They warn you that lions mark their territory by spraying, and they can spray up to 20 ft. So if you see a lion turn, you should run. Well, while we were watching the lions he got mad at a man standing there and growled, and ran up to him. He immediately turned his back and I have never run so fast in my life. I just knew we were about to get sprayed.

We had a great time just walking the strip and taking in the sites. We watched a 4D M&M movie at the huge M&M World store. We also saw the Polar Express on 4D at one the hotels. It was super neat, and I wish our kids could have been there for that.

This is in front of the Bellagio while we were waiting for the water show to start. I was shocked that the song they were playing for the dancing fountains was Hallelujah Chorus. The weather was pretty nice while we were there. It had snowed a few days before we got there, and in the shade there was still snow even though it was in the lower 40s.

While we were walking through the mall on the strip we walked past a store and saw Pete Rose. You could only talk to him and get his autograph if you bought one of his items from the store, starting at $75 for a baseball. Didn't want to talk to him that much. lol

By far the highlight of the trip was playing slots. It was a lot of fun. This was our biggest win, triple 7s across and we won 1620...too bad it was nickels. It was still over $81 on $.15, not too bad. Overall, we netted $215 over what we spent on slots. We were to cheap to do quarter or dollar slots, because it is amazing how fast you can pull that lever. lol We went to the top of the Stratosphere, and it was pretty neat to look over all of Vegas at night with all the pretty lights. We saw 2 different shows., and really enjoyed them. We wouldn't mind going back in the future, there was lots of things we didn't get a chance to see.

When we got to the airport to come home, we were suppose to leave Vegas at 7:25 pm (9:25 central) and land in Houston at 12:30 am central time. My sweet sis was suppose to pick us up at the airport and we were going to crash at her house (she lives about 20 min from the airport). The hotel told us to leave 2 hours before the flight to get there and get through security. Well we must have timed it perfectly because we were at the airport and through security within 30 minutes of leaving the hotel. So we were already going to be waiting over 1 1/2 hours for our flight. Evidently, there was a snow storm in Chicago and it was causing havic at all of the airports. Our flight was delayed for almost 2 hours, and I was just so happy we had planned to come home on the 23rd and not the 24th. We finally landed in Houston and got to my sister's around 3:30 in the morning. We were exhausted, but so thankful for my sis that woke up to come pick us up in the middle of the night.