Vegas, part 1

So, Nathan and I took a trip to Las Vegas earlier this week to celebrate our 27th/32nd anniversary (belated, in that our wedding anniversary was at the end of December, and early, in that the anniversary of us meeting is next week). We'd not spent any significant time there before (have driven through but nothing more) so decided to see what all the hype was about. :)

We arrived Monday evening and made our way to our hotel. (We stayed at The Flamingo for its lower price and central location on The Strip. Thankfully, I saw someplace that the smart thing to do was to join the Caesar Rewards program and get the app so you could check yourself in and was so glad we did! The line for checking in was crazy long.) After finding our room and dropping off our bags, we wandered down to the Linq Promenade for dinner then walked The Strip to the north and took in the free volcano show at the Mirage and the fountain show at the Bellagio. We also enjoyed the view from our room...of the Sphere and the High Roller wheel.  

On Tuesday, we said hello to the resident flamingos at our hotel then rode the Deuce bus to the Arts District and did more wandering and walking. We found lovely murals and ate lunch in the Arts District...walked to and through the Fremont Street Experience...found a fun Container Park with cute little shops...chilled at a local coffee shop that was amazing (Public Us, highly recommend!!)...and walked across the street to Fergusons Downtown (billed as a kind of in-person Etsy mall) and enjoyed the quiet (actually just relaxed in the courtyard area for a good bit, soaking up the beautiful weather). 

From there, we walked a bit to the Neon Museum for our 4:30 admission. We wandered through their "boneyard" of old neon signs. It was really cool and we took a lot of pictures while enjoying the signs posted with cool information about the signs and about individual women of Las Vegas (since March is Women's History Month). We'd timed our admission tickets so that we were able to appreciate the signs both in the daylight and after dark...which was awesome.

We then Uber'd back to The Strip (after dark, it wasn't recommended to walk the area). We ended up sharing the famous Trash Can Nachos at Guy Fieri's Vegas Kitchen & Bar. They were fabulous! (I've watched enough Food Network that it was kinda cool to be there, so I also got a photo with a cutout of Guy, lol.) 

After that, we rode the High Roller (it's a 30 minute ride) and enjoyed the views over The Strip. Nathan also got this shot (bottom right) of the BattleBots arena. It was actually just down the block from our hotel, but sadly they didn't have any tickets for the nights we were there. (We've enjoyed BattleBots for years after being introduced to it during our Mythbusters days and had become reacquainted recently after adding the Discovery+ add-on to our Prime streaming services.) 

And that was Monday and Tuesday. Back in a minute with the rest of our trip...