Year-end holidays in Las Vegas

Finally, my hubby had an almost 2-week break. After exploring the option of visiting South America or Mexico, we decided to abandon our initial plans to visit those places, as the air-tickets and hotels were too expensive. Instead, we decided to spend our vacanes in the US, given our limited budget. Hence, we ended up in Las Vegas as none of us had visited the place before and we also managed to find a relatively cheap package.

Off to Vegas we went. Our friends who had visited Vegas before gave us some tips before our trip, therefore, we were quite prepared for the trip. For example, we were not surprised to find that there were slot machines at the boarding gates and the baggage retrieval area in the airport. We were also not surprised when our hotel told us that we would have to pay $15 per night to borrow their coffee-making machine. While we like Vegas for its cleanliness(the streets are much cleaner than those in Philly) and spacious sidewalks, we were appalled at some of the prices of stuff. For example, a bottle of drinks can easily cost $3 at the convenience store in a hotel or a theatre.

While we were there, we watched two Cirque du Soleil's shows,'O' and 'Mystere', though I prefer the former to the latter. Mystere seems somewhate lacklustre, especially so after we watched 'O'. We felt that we should have gone for KA(which seemed somewhat more spectacular on the promotional video which was screened on the TV in our hotel room). We also managed to catch the David Copperfield's show. While I was not very impressed by the magic and the scale of the theatre(perhaps I have seen most of his best performances on TV), I found that he was really funny and he could really make the cut for a comedian.

Besides being famous for its show, Las Vegas is also famous for the many buffets in the hotels. We tried the buffets at Bellagio and Planet Hollywood(Spice Market) and we must admit that the latter is so much better in terms of quality of food. The range of food is much better at Bellagio but the cooking is so-so. The buffet at Bellagio also cost more.

On Christmas, we went a Grand Canyon tour. Initially, there were plans for us to rent a car and made a road trip. However, we decided against it as it would be too tiring to drive there 4 hours and try to make it back to Vegas in another 4 hours, all within a day. We wanted to relax and take things easy so we left the driving to our coach driver. He was very knowledge and funny too, so we were glad to have gone on the trip. Grand Canyon was really impressive but it was cold there(afterall, the viewing areas were located on higher altitudes). The next time we visit Grand Canyon, we would make a trip down to the bottom of the gorge and explore it from below. On the way back to Philly in the plane, we actually managed to see the Grand Canyon from above. Here are some of the shots along with photos of Las Vegas Strip itself.



Aerial view of Grand Canyon












The snow on the rocks at Grand Canyon
















Nightview of the Strip