Las Vegas October 1999

Our next trip together was to Las Vegas. John's parents took us and John's brother to Vegas for a family vacation. It was pretty cool. We stayed on the strip where all the glitzy hotels are. Both of us had been to Vegas before but separately. I'd never been to Lake Mead before.
Here I am doing my impression of Wyle E Coyote from the Looney Toons cartoons. I know, it's kind of silly but I couldn't help myself.

We got there kind of early in the morning so Dad took us on a cruise of Lake Mead to see Hoover Dam. That was really cool.
Here's John as we're boarding the boat for the cruise around Lake Mead.
Here's Mom & Dad in front of Lake Mead.

After the cruise we went to our hotel on the strip. We stayed at Bally's. It was very cool. Check out our room. It had a mirror over the bed. This is a reflection of John laying on the bed.
It was a little weird to wake up to your own reflection first thing in the morning. Yikes!

The was an earthquake while we were there. I think it must have been a medium sized one someplace close by. I vaguely remember waking up and telling John to stop shaking the bed.

As we are not avid gamblers, we spent a lot of our time walking up and down the strip. First we went over to Cesar's Palace to watch the dancing water.
Then we went over to The Mirage to check out the eruption of the volcano.
There's lots to see here for non-gamblers, especially on the strip. Just walking around is quite entertaining. It's also very cool just to walk through some of the hotels. The Venetian, for example, has a "river" that flows through the actual hotel and you can take gondola rides. We didn't do that this time around but we did walk through some of the nicer hotels. In the Bellagio, they had a beautiful garden. We saw several couples there getting married.
This is John the garden in the lobby of the Bellagio. Off to the left, you can see a guy in a black suit walking away. This was a groom (with his bride) that had been having their pictures taken. I assume they had been married and weren't just dressed in wedding attire.

Paris Paris had the Eiffel Tower. You could actually go up into the tower and look out. I wonder how close this is to the real thing. Probably not as tall but still pretty impressive.

The MGM Grand had the lions in the front of the hotel and inside they had photos of some of the old Hollywood stars like Clark Gable, Viven Leigh and Jimmy Stewart. Below is one of the pictures in the museum - Jean Harlow. She's one of my favorite actresses from that time period.


They also have the Coca Cola museum there. As a HUGE fan of Coca Cola art, I had to go in.
This is us with the coca cola bear. The sun kind of hit us funny. The museum was really cool. They had Coke from all over the world. You'd think it was all the same but it wasn't. Some of it wasn't even really very good. They also had little dispensers so that you could have all the coke you wanted. When you put your cup under the dispenser, your Coke would jump from a bottle across the room and land in the dispenser and pour into your cup. It was very cool.
You can see the Coke in the air. They also had old Coca Cola art (ad's from the '20s and '30's) and they had a race car. The whole thing was very interesting.

They also had the M&M store that sold nothing but M&Ms and M&M related products. (Was I in Heaven or what??). At this store they had M&Ms in every color and shade in big barrels where you could buy as much or as little as you wanted. They also had a wall of M&M candy.
Isn't it beautiful? It took great restraint but I refrained from diving right in. I also refrained from buying anything. I was overwhelmed by the choices but once I thought about it, these M&Ms taste just like what I get at home in the little brown bag. Still it was a cool store.

While we aren't major gamblers, we did try our luck in the various casinos. I played the nickel slots (trying to make my alloted gambling money last) but I didn't win any big money. I won a few times on the quarter slots. J played Blackjack and I think a little poker. It was hard to find poker tables that were less than $25 a hand. At that rate, you can blow through your gambling money pretty quickly. We played blackjack at the same table for a little while. But, once we lost our gambling allowance, we moved on to more sight seeing.

John's mom, however, did very well on the slot machines. She didn't win anything to write home about but she won enough to keep playing for a while.

On the last day, we went over to the stratosphere so John, Dave & Tanya could ride the roller coaster. Not me, sir. It was a roller coaster on top of a hotel. There was no way I was going on that. The sign as they went in said that they should take stuff out of their pockets. I guess that meant that the ride was going to shake upside down.
There they go.

We had a really good time in Vegas. I got to spend some time with John's family. We also met up with friends of Pete. They did parlays in the football games. I think we all did one. I don't remember coming home with any extra money so I must not have hit. Still, it was a great time had by all.