Vegas Baby!

I was lucky enough to swing a trip to Vegas this year just in time for my birthday. I had been asking to go to different trade shows for quite awhile now, and finally was approved to go to the Consumer Electronics Show. Evidently we were too busy at work to stay for any more than a day....never mind that I billed a whole 8 hours in the past three days. But it was better than nothing. It ended up being just Matt and I for this trip.

We flew in on Sunday the 6th, and stayed at the La Quinta - that's where all the high rollers stay or so I hear. We threw our bags in the room and grabbed a cab to head to the convention center to pick up our passes to walk the show before it opened the next day. We spent about 4-5 hours walking all three convention halls before calling it a day around 9:00 and decided to head to the strip. To make a long story short, the huge size of the nearest casino greatly skewed our estimate on how far it was to walk....we walked for about 30 minutes before we got to the strip. Sorry, most of my pictures didn't do so well in the dark, so these are the only ones that turned out halfway decent.

We had a very nice dinner at BOA thanks to Derse. I highly recommend it, but bring your money, it's a bit expensive. But then again everything in Vegas is expensive.

After getting to where the "action" was, we acted like total design dorks and walked through most of the casinos gawking at the architecture, marble floors, and sheer size of the buildings. We watched the fountain show at the Bellagio (see video below). To give you a sense of scale in the video, I am standing about 10' above the water. We also went inside to make our $40 donations to the Bellagio....gambling just isn't my thing - I was mad the rest of the night that they had my $40!



Lobby ceiling of the Bellagio is made from huge platters of blown glass. Some of them are over 60" in diameter. Matt is a glass blower, so he was amazed by this part of the building.

After that we walked to a few other casinos and gift shops before calling it a night. No, nothing crazy. We were fairly lame if you ask me - back to the hotel around 12:00 because we didn't want to walk anymore. We estimated that we had walked about 9-10 miles in about 6 hours that day.

I had never been a big fan of Vegas before this trip. Like I said, I have never been much of a gambler, but there are tons of cool free stuff to see and do in Vegas. I definitely want to go back, but next time I won't be making any donations.