What Happens in Vegas...

You may remember that the primary motivation for this trip was (of course) to see Phantom the Las Vegas Spectacular, but we did plenty of other stuff while we were there. I'll probably write up something about Phantom in a separate post so Andrea can skip it ;), but here is a recap of the things we did day 1 and 2.

Day 1 began waaaaaaaaay too early at about 5 in the morning, since we had to be at the airport early. We got to Vegas around 3:40 thanks to the time difference and got all settled around 5. We decided to do dinner in our hotel (circus circus) and then check out some stuff around the strip.

Having never been west, it looked like
a new planet!

slots in the airport. Trying to get ya out of the gate

mmmmm. Margaritas

Where did we end up going the first night? Yep. The Chippendales show. Money well spent ladies, money well spent. If you have seen Magic Mike, it's kind of that in real life.  It wasn't a super cheap show but it wasn't expensive, so we decided that we should add that to our Vegas list. So we headed over to the Rio to check it out.

worth it.

It was an interesting experience. Definitely the perfect place for a Bachelorette party. We had a lot of fun; it was quite the bonding experience.

not as cool as the real one, but still cool

 Across the street, you can find dancing water at the Bellagio. The fountains are coordinated to over 30 different songs and it's pretty cool, especially at night. We ended up seeing like 3 or 4 in total while we were there, including "This Kiss," "Proud to Be an American." and I think a Pavarotti medley. It's free and fun!

Bellagio water fountain show

waiting for the next show

Then we ran into Johnny Depp characters

 The next day, we started down at the end of the strip at Mandalay Bay and worked our way up the strip towards the Venetian, where Phantom plays.

entrance to the Aquarium/Shark Reef

lol

attention whore fish is an attention whore

inside the reef

touching some rays

SAWFISH and a shark

aureole restaurant with a 3 story wine cellar. They get
it with a trapeze 

Checkin out the Excalibur 

Across is New York, New York

and then MGM

We hopped on the tram and headed up the street to Paris Las Vegas and headed up the Eiffel Tower, which is really only half the height of the real one, but it was very cool to be able to look down the Strip.

Nice view of the Bellagio from the top
of the Eiffel Tower

 It was almost time for Phantom, so we headed down to the Venetian, which is my unbiasedly favorite casino/hotel on the strip.

SO GOOD

Will write about that later. Anyway, after the show we saw a few more of the free things around the strip. As we walked to find Ronnie and Lauren, who hadn't seen Phantom, we saw the Mirage volcano erupt as we were heading over to Treasure Island to see the Siren Cove show.

Mirage volcano eruption

I take mature pics

TI

Crazy effects in the show!!

The end of the Siren Show

It was a very long first 2 days, and we had a very early day the next day as our bus pickup for the Grand Canyon was at 5:50 am. We headed back and tried to get some sleep after the first few very exciting days in Vegas.