Vegas, Baby

A few months ago, Nick found out he was approved to go to the SAP conference in Las Vegas. Neither of us had ever been, so we decided to take this opportunity to have a little romance get away. We ordered tickets, booked our room at The Venetian for an extra night, and started counting down the days until we headed to Sin City.
We arrived Saturday and were immediately blown away by the city. Even the airport was nice.


We headed to our hotel, which was beautiful. When I have read about Vegas or seen it in the movies, I always imagined it to be flashy and extravagant. The real thing lived up to my expectations. Our hotel had an indoor mall which connected The Venetian where we were staying to The Palazzo next door. Running through this gigantic shopping and restaurant area was a canal where people could travel around on gondolas, a miniature version of St.Mark's Square, street performers, and a ceiling painted to look like the sky. There were not one, but two food courts, beautiful casinos, theatres and gorgeous decor everywhere you turned. Here's a few pictures of our hotel and suite. Our room had three TV's including one in the bathroom and you controlled the curtains from your bed with a remote control.


Our first night, we were booked to see the Beatles Love show at the Mirage at 9:30. This is way past my bedtime, but I was prepared to try my best to stay up late. We booked dinner at Otto, which is a Mario Batali restaurant in the Venetian. It was delicious and we shared prosciutto and goat cheese pizza and a pasta with mushroom and olive oil, as well as a bottle of Prosecco, which is like Italian champagne. Then we had some time left before we needed to leave for the show, so we gambled a bit. We had already lost $160 at Blackjack earlier in the day, but the very nice dealer at the craps table taught me to play and basically coached me until I was up about $100. We headed to the show, which was fabulous. The Beatles Love show is a Cirque de Soleil performance and it totally lived up to my expectations. They had fantastic stunts and costumes, including the typical rope twirling girls and a stage that at one point converted into one gigantic trampoline. The entire show was set to a Beatles soundtrack.

Our second day, we decided to walk and see the Strip. We tried to visit all the hotels we'd always been curious about. First of all, the Strip is deceptively long. When you are standing at your hotel on one end looking down the street, it looks like each of the other hotels is only a couple blocks away. We walked for hours, visiting New York, Paris, Planet Hollywood, Caesar's Palace, the Bellagio Fountains (one of our favorite things there), and a few cheaper hotels for discount gambling. We won some more money playing craps...I started to feel a little cocky about my gambling skills. This is never a good thing in Vegas. First we were up $100and then we were swiftly put in our place and lost that $100 in a span of about 10 minutes. This proved the saying "You win some, you lose some" very true. We decided to stop gambling and head back to the hotel to get ready for our second dinner and show. This time we ate at the Grand Lux Cafe in the Palazzo which was conveniently located right next door to the Jersey Boys theater. After dinner, we headed to the Piano Bar for a drink before the show. They were having a dueling piano show which we loved! Then we went in to see the Jersey Boys and headed up to our seats way at the top of the theater. As a wonderful surprise, the usher upgraded our seats since there were some unsold tickets for our show. We were so excited to be sitting in the 8th row!! Jersey Boys was FANTASTIC! The music and the actors were amazing...I would recommend this show to anyone visiting Vegas, or if the Broadway musical heads to your hometown.



On my last day in Vegas, we walked all the way to the end of the Strip to Mandalay Bay to visit the indoor aquarium and shark reef. We enjoyed lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe and spent some quality time together people watching! What a great place to just sit back and watch people walk by. That evening we headed back to the Bellagio to watch the fountain show at night. I never realized how incredibly large the fountain is. If spans almost an entire city block and shoots water up in the air so high that the spurts almost reach to the top of the Bellagio's hotel towers. We enjoyed dinner at Cabo Wabo and wonderful Waboritas then headed back to the hotel. Nick stayed the rest of the week for his convention, but I headed back Tuesday, tired and ready to return to reality.