The Cole's: Viva Las Vegas

Dan and I took a few days to get away for our 10 year Anniversary that is coming up this fall. We decided to do it during the summer since both kids wouldn't miss any school or other activities. We went to Las Vegas and had such a great time!

We were on a pretty tight budget but made the trip work thanks to Allegiant Air! We flew out of Springfield which let us stay for another night for less than what we would have spent had we flown out of XNA. We stayed a total of 4 nights!

I met Dan's mom in our usual halfway meeting spot and dropped off the kids on a Wednesday, the day before we left. It was great to have a full afternoon and evening to get packed and to get the house picked up. on Thursday, Dan and I got up and on our way to Springfield. Our flight left at 12:30 and we landed in Las Vegas close to 1:00 Vegas time. Here we are on the plane getting ready for take off!

This was taken while we were flying over the vast desert area.

Once we landed in Vegas, we took a shuttle to our hotel. We stayed at the Luxor which was located on the south end of the strip. I think Dan and I both agreed that if we were to ever stay in Vegas again we would stay toward the middle of the strip due to the fact that it is more centralized to all the fun stuff!

This is a photo of part of the Luxor...and the palm trees!!

The Luxor was located right next to Excalibur Hotel...we thought that is looked like it would belong in Disney!

We spent the first day just seeing the sites. We ate lunch at one of the MANY food courts around and tried to find our best deal for show tickets. The weather there was hot but it wasn't anything like the hot we have here in Arkansas. It actually took us a while to sweat and we were walking and moving around.

This is at New York, New York. You can barely see it but behind the Statue of Liberty there was a roller coaster on top of the hotel! Pretty incredible!

This was taken walking over the crosswalks in Vegas. This is looking north up the strip. The walking in Vegas in just unbelievable. You would think it wouldn't take long to walk up the strip but it is so deceiving because you have to walk through hotels and casinos (essentially to make you spend more money) and also you have to walk across the strip several times as well. I only brought my Teva sandals to wear and my feet were killing me by the end of the night.

This is look at the Eiffel Tower. We thought about eating dinner there one night but decided to save the money for other things since we were really watching what we were spending.

We saw some amazing people in Vegas. This is spiderman (I took this for Caleb!). We also saw Hello Kitty, Michael Jackson, Elvis and Toy Story characters...just to name a few. I was surprised at how kid "friendly" Vegas was. There were tons of couples our age with their kids with them. I felt bad for some of the kids though because on the nights that we were out until midnight, there were kids still in tow dead asleep on their parents shoulders. Just seems horrible to me to put kids through that!

We also went into Caesar's Palace and looked at the Shop's at the Forum. They have every store imaginable there!

There are a lot of Hotels on the strip that have shows periodically throughout the day for people who are just passing by. This one below is at Treasure Island and they would hold a pirate show every hour with shooting water and lots of lights.

This was the strip at night...I took my small camera with me since I wanted to be away from "work" and my good camera is "work" to me so my night photos were blurry...worth it to me to just be away and focus on my man and our time together.

Loved the palm trees!

Our second day there, my right foot was really bothering me. I guess it was from all the walking we did the previous day and it was literally bruised! There were two things that were on our mission for that day. One was to get a connector to hook up our tablets to the wired internet in our room and the second thing was to find something to calm the aching in my foot! We were unsuccessful at both of them. Dan and I took the bus to a few electronic stores with no luck on finding the correct adapter that was needed to connect ethernet to a USB. Crazy to me that there was no wireless internet in our hotel. I guess you can't have all the luxuries in life! So, we decided to just go to the pool and relax. And we went to Walgreens to get ice packs and icy hot for my foot and it didn't help much. So after eating lunch we spent a few hours at the pool! Fruity drinks pool side made the day much better!

These are some photos of the Luxor.

And these were taken while we were at the pool.

That night I bared the pain and decided to go out on the strip for a few hours. The photo above was taken at the Luxor. I have heard that the beam from the Luxor can be seen from space. Not sure if that is true but it was pretty bright! We walked down to the Bellagio and watched the fountains, heard an outdoor band and went and got a few drinks. It was great to just take in the night life and people watch!

The next day, which was Saturday, Dan and I took advantage of getting some cheap tickets to a Cirque Du Soleil show so we went to a three hour timeshare promotional meeting. It wasn't too bad actually. We paid $50 to sit and listen to people talk about timeshares, got nice pastries and coffee to drink and then at the end we got to Cirque tickets to Mystere, $100 to go to a REALLY nice steakhouse in our hotel and we also got $100 in promotional credits to use at a Casino Royale. It was worth it! After the timeshare business, we took the bus down the Shops at the Forums again and had a gourmet pizza followed by chocolate!

Then we walked around again and saw yet another show at the Bellagio.

Here are a few photos of our room. Not bad but not sure it was worth what we paid. The spa was great though! Especially to rest my tired feet!

The last day we were there, we hung out at the pool most of the day and slept in. That night we used our $100 voucher to a steak dinner and it was SO good!

After dinner, we walked out of the hotel to head to our Cirque show and it started pouring rain. I was totally not prepared for the rain. I was completely dressed up, hair done, makeup fixed and it was miserable. But I just went with it. We huddled under a small awning waiting for the bus to come for at least fifteen minutes. Dan and I were drenched! We got on the bus and tried to shake off as much water as possible and since there was so much rain in such a small amount of time there was flooding on the strip which caused traffic to stand still. Then our bus stopped running due to a windshield wiper malfunction and we had to run the rest of the way to Treasure Island in the ran...and flooded streets. And it wasn't a short distance. We had left ourselves 45 minutes to get from our hotel to Treasure Island which we thought would give us plenty of time without rain but since we weren't expecting the rain we ended up being 10 minutes late. Thankfully we didn't miss much of the show and we had pretty decent seats! All in all we had a good time and thanks to the desert dry temps, we were dry in no time!

After the show we heard rumors that there was going to be a firework show at Caesar's Palace for the 4th of July (it was the 3rd of July), we decided to wait it out to see the fireworks but there was so many people and I didn't want to be in the middle of the mass chaos after the show was over so we walked down to the Bellagio and we were able to see the fireworks along with a water show at the same time. It was beautiful!