So after a much needed rest (I'm feeling much
better now) we headed to Burgr (sic), Gordon Ramsay's restaurant at
Planet Hollywood for dinner. While Andrew waited in the considerable
line, I went to the V theatre to pick up our tickets for Evil Dead
the Musical. Almost a hour later we were seated and ready to order.
We both got a milkshake and burger each and it was absolutely
phenomenal. The shakes are served in a giant tall glass and consist
of thickshake on the bottom, about six centimetres of pudding/custard
on top, with whipped cream and a biscuit on top of that. Amazing! The
burgers were also brilliant, on par with Fancy, but slightly greasier
and bigger. (They were amazing - Andrew)
From way too much food we made our way to the
musical. Sooooo glad we weren't in the splash zone, those people were
horribly drenched in watered down fake blood. It was very funny and
thoroughly enjoyable. You would need to have seen all of the films,
as well as having a fairly sound knowledge of Raimi and Campbell's
work to get all the jokes, but as we do we really enjoyed ourselves,
and were close enough to the splash zone to get a few errant sprays
ourselves. We stayed afterwards for a quick photo with Ash (the main
character) before heading back to our hotel. A really fun night in
Vegas. (I wish we were in the splash zone - Andrew)
Saturday
Today was a special day – we went and picked up
our car. Andrew's Christmas present was that we upgraded the car
to...a black Mustang convertible with all the options. So we now had
a ridiculous American muscle car with which to traverse the country
(I'm sure many photos will follow). We decided to use the new found
car freedom to go shopping at the north outlet mall that day, so we
set up the GPS (best invention in the world) and drove to the mall, a
stressful experience that Andrew handled exceptionally well, with
help from Stephen Fry. We spent about 4 hours shopping, buying
Levi's, shoes and other cheap clothes, before heading back to pick up
and do washing prior to my most anticipated show, Zumanity.
We dumped our shopping, grabbed the laundry and
went to a local laundromat, where we had some delicious Vietnamese
food whilst waiting for our washing to be done. An our or so later it
was finished and we made our way to New York New York for the seven
o'clock show. Wow, it was stunning! It's a Cirque du Soleil show that
I thoroughly recommend everyone see if given the chance. Sexy, funny
and amazingly well put together with a live band as well as the
performers, it's definitely one of the most incredible shows I've
ever seen.
From the show we wanted to do some more driving so
we headed to Caesar's Palace for a wander, having not visited before,
and spent some time admiring the shops before heading back to our
hotel. A brilliant way to spend an evening.
Sunday
We had a sleep in and then decided to do some more driving. To get in some practice we went to check out a WalMart, having heard a great deal about them but not actually having seen one. It's basically Big W, Bunnings, K Mart and Woolworths rolled into one giant store. We bought some socks and undies, some snacks and had a look around, but it's really just basic boring shopping.
We then headed back to the strip for more of a look around. We went and got some lunch and had a look in Marshall's, a cheap designer warehouse, but we didn't get anything. We had a general last wander of the strip and then went back to our hotel for a show.
Finally it was time for our final Vegas show, The Blue Man Group! They were excellent - it's hard to describe what they do - it's a mixture of performance art, audience participation, musical theatre and comedy, plus percussion fused with electronica. It was thoroughly immersive and really brilliant, I'd really recommend it for everyone, families included (there were many children present) and we were allowed to take some video (which might help to clarify my rather useless description).
Our last show done, we went upstairs to our room (it was in our hotel) and had an early night in preparation for tomorrow.
Monday
Road trip time! Today we began early, getting up
and about, ready to head to Hoover Dam and the Grand Canyon. We
hopped in the car, put the roof down (who cares that it's cold,
right!?) and headed onto the open road.
Hoover Dam is around 40 minutes from Vegas, so we
made our way there through the mountains and had a relatively brief
look around at this engineering marvel before getting back on the
road. From the Dam it's approximately 4 hours to the South side of
the Canyon in Arizona, the best part for the view apparently. What a
giant, geographically spectacular place Arizona is! With music
blaring, and flying along at 80mph (around 130km per hour) we passed
up into the mountains, wound through the desert, back into scrub, up
more mountains until reaching forest and (finally) getting to the
canyon at about 4.15pm in the afternoon. I will say we pulled over
around three hours into the trip to put the roof on when we saw that
there was SNOW on the side of the road. It clearly gets very cold in
the desert at 7000 feet.
We were panicked about losing the sun and
practically ran to the lookout where we were greeted by a vista that
is so breathtaking your mind has to expand to try and even conceive
of it. You expect the canyon to be big, but it's very difficult to
capture the vastness of the expanse and depth of the ravines in
words. It's a truly awesome experience and one which was well worth
the long drive. With the light fading we made our way onto a small
'path' and took some photos on an unprotected ledge we were able to
(relatively) safely get to before we lost the light entirely and had
to make the long drive home. It was freezing but we were both
exhilarated by the experience of seeing such an amazing place. I was
particularly happy because we also saw some deer with huge antlers on
the side of the road, and a coyote ran across our path on the way
back to the car.
Driving back was fine (Andrew discovered that the
car is limited to 113mph) and as we pulled into the strip we
decided our last meal (at about 10pm) should be something thoroughly
terrible, so we went to the Cheesecake Factory at Caesar's Place.
Some deep fried mozzarella, orange chicken and key lime pie
cheesecake later and we were full to bursting, it was getting late
and our last night in Vegas was coming to an end. We hadn't actually
done any real gambling so we each took $1 and had about 15 minutes of
fun on two of the old fashioned one-armed-bandit 1c machines. I won
$1.83 and cashed in. Andrew lost his dollar. Tired but happy we drove
back to the Monte Carlo to crash before another long day tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment