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3 Days in Vegas – Day 3: Around and About
This is the last post in the series about our 3-days excursion to Las Vegas, which took place last September. In case you missed posts about first two days, here are the links – Day 1 Part 1, Day 1 Part 2 and Day 2. Yes, you should expect more pictures too.
Just to recap, on the first day we were getting acclimated in Las Vegas and were running around to the point of total exhaustion. Our second day was all about amazing Grand Canyon experience, on which I reported with inclusion of lots of pictures. By the way, I don’t know if you noticed the “mini-quiz” question at the end of the second day post – I was asking you what I could’ve tried to take the picture of.
This was actually my attempt to take a picture of the Hoover Dam during the night from the window of the moving bus – talented, right?
Let’s proceed with our third day. This was our last full day in Las Vegas, as we were going back home the next day, thus our goal was to get as much of Vegas as possible within one day, but – at a reasonable pace. Besides, it was my wife’s actual birthday, so we had to do something about that as well.
I started my morning from the walk to the nearby convenience store and the liquor store. Wait, not true. I actually started my morning from taking of a few pictures through our room’s window. Just to show you that all those casinos are not called “resorts” for nothing, here is the proof:
And here is the view of the strip from our room:
Now, let’s talk about the morning. You see, I already mentioned before that I have a problem with paying $4 for the bottle of water. Moreover, we prefer sparkling water which is often not even available in little stores inside the casinos. The convenience store was located literally across the street from Tour and Travel lobby of Mandalay Bay which we used the day before, and the liquor store was in a close proximity as well. The reason to go to the liquor store? I’m a cheap bastard, add I also have an idea of general wine prices, which makes me cringe looking at quadruple retail prices in the restaurant wine lists – thus getting a bottle of wine to for us to drink later on sounded like a good thing to do. I got a few bottles of seltzer, a bottle of Cava and California red blend – tasting notes will follow later.
Done with that, back to the room at around 9 am – time for a breakfast. Instead of going again to the buffet, we decided to go to one of the sit down restaurants inside the casino, Raffles Cafe. We decided to get two different omelets and over-sized french toast – all the food was okay, but not great. Well, at least pictures look okay:
On the negative side, we had to wait a loooong time. And price wise, we paid for three dishes practically the same amount as in the buffet, so good buffet, such as the one at MGM Grand, definitely provides much better value. Please understand that I’m not taking about quantity of food – we ended up eating a lot more in the restaurant versus the buffet – I’m talking about quality and variety.
For the Day 3, our plan was simple – to enjoy ourselves. We already had two very intense days, we saw and experienced a lot, so no matter how little we would see on the day 3, our mission was already accomplished.
Let’s talk again about little planning. I like to know in advance what is happening in the place I’m going to (especially in the place like Las Vegas, where there are literally millions of things happening every given moment). Based on some prior reading and past experience, I had a few things in mind. “Bodies” exhibition, on its last few days, conveniently located at Luxor. Eiffel tower at Paris hotel. Dinner at buffet in Bellagio. Night time adults show, but not too late as we have to fly home the next day. More walking around without killing ourselves, as we did on the first day. Oh yeah, and we have to drink the wine at some point. Anyway, I think this was a pretty good plan, so we started from walking to Luxor and getting tickets for “Bodies” and the evening show called Fantasy.
“Bodies” had been going for a while already, exhibiting in different cities around the country. It actually presents lots of completely dissected human bodies and even individual organs, preserved with the special compounds and showing how our bodies operate. We were not allowed to take any pictures, but you can find some examples and more information about preservation process and other details at this link. We walked through the whole exhibition in about 40 minutes, and at times it was necessary to forcefully compose ourselves, as some visuals just got to you, so we both were very happy to finally walk through the exit door.
Our next stop was Paris (the casino, of course). Considering that this was Sunday in the middle of the day, we chose taxi as the mode of transportation and we got to Paris in about 5 minutes and under $10. Our goal was to visit at Eiffel tower, where you can get upstairs and enjoy 360° view of Las Vegas. This is the paid attraction, so we had to get tickets (there was no line). Quick elevator ride up, and here we are, looking at Bellagio fountains and all around from the top.
One interesting fact is that the Eiffel tower replica at Paris casino was originally designed to be an exact copy of the actual Eiffel tower, in exactly same size – but Las Vegas airport is too close, so the resulting tower was built at the half size of the original. Still, the views are beautiful and well worth your time.
As I mentioned, we didn’t want to squeeze too much into one day, so we decided to visit some of the casinos within walking distance of Paris, preferably with some additional attractions. First we went to Flamingo, which boasts Wildlife Habitat. That Wildlife Habitat was not difficult to find, but – I wouldn’t say this was exactly what we expected. There were a few flamingos, some other birds and a few fishes – pretty cool for Las Vegas, but hardly worth any special attention (unless you never saw a flamingo before, you are now in Vegas and seeing the pink bird was always your dream).
As a side note I have to also mention that Flamingo is the most run-down casino on the strip, at least from what we saw (bottom line – you can skip it).
Next stop (short walking distance) was Caesars Palace.
From what we saw, this was probably the most lavishly appointed casino – beautifully designed in the classic Roman style.
We made an attempt to see a free show, called the Fall of Atlantis. Finding it required a pretty steep walk through a huge mall called Forum Shops. By the time we found the place, we had to watch the show somewhat from the distance, as there were lots of people there already.
After two minutes, we found the acoustics terrible and show boring, so we decided to walk back through this huge place will millions of stores and then we just spent some time sitting on the bench and admiring all the beautiful architecture around us.
Next we walked to the Bellagio – our early dinner was calling. First we went again to the conservatory, now to see it in the day light. I took a few pictures, similar to the ones on the first day, only with a different lighting.
And – we had a light music to add up to the experience.
Do you think I can leave you without pictures of the flowers? Not a chance…
We headed to the Bellagio buffet at around 4:45 in the afternoon, which was a good call – when we were leaving it at about an hour later, the waiting line was extending back into the casino. In general, I believe the buffet at Bellagio is considered to be the best in Vegas (and I remember being pretty excited after visiting it about 5 years ago). This time – it was good – good variety of food, sumptuous crab legs (probably the main attraction there), good desserts – but it was lacking the “umpf”. May be because it was Sunday, may be my taste changed – I’m not sure, but the excitement was not there.
In any case, it was a good dinner, and now it was the time to go back to our room, open the wines and relax.
Here are tasting notes for the wines.
Poema Cava Brut Penedes ($14, 11.5% ABV) – yeasty, with notes of toasted bread, good acidity, good balance – excellent QPR
The red wine was Bear Flag Smooth Red, California ($12, 12% ABV) – a blend of Tempranillo, Touriga, Zinfandel and Alicante Bouchet – very nice, with the hint of smoke and cinnamon on the nose, ripe cherries, coffee and dark chocolate notes on the palate, good acidity, with little sharpness on the palate and mouthfeel a touch lighter than you might want – but very drinkable. Great QPR. Also the label was very interesting, completely surrounding the bottle:
Believe it or not, but this is pretty much all I have to tell you about our 3 days in Vegas. Yes, we went to see the show, Fantasy, and I guess it was something we expected – but nothing more and nothing less.
The next day we were on our way back to New York, and we were very happy to get home and hug the kids.
All in all, it was a great experience, and we had a great time – and we will gladly come back to Vegas at some other time.
I don’t know if you found any of these posts useful or even remotely funny, but I hope that at least liked a picture or two. Until the next time – cheers!
3 Days in Vegas – Day 1: Total Exhaustion, Part 2
This is the continuation of the post about our 3-days Vegas adventure. In case you missed the first post, below is the link for you:
Sure, some 25 minutes later and 2 or 3 stops to ask for directions, we managed to get to the train. Short ride, another walk, tram – and we finally arrived at Mandalay Bay.
Our “small meal” at MGM buffet (hope you sense the sarcasm) finally started to wear off, so we were ready to eat – which brings us to the subject of food, which in Las Vegas definitely deserves its own special coverage and attention.
I think that Las Vegas has highest in the world concentration of the high end restaurants per square foot. Can you think of a famous chef? Doesn’t matter who you came up with, I can practically guarantee that he or she will have their own restaurant in Las Vegas. What you should also expect is that those restaurants will be priced accordingly. I perfectly understand that visiting a great restaurant is an experience, and as such, it has its own price – but, in the end of the day, Las Vegas is a tourist, holiday town, and it is not for nothing all those casinos refer to themselves as resorts (by the way, they also charge resort fee, if you care to know). When you walk around the vacation town, what do you often see advertised on the doors of the restaurants? If you said “happy hour”, you are corrrrect! Considering the level of the restaurants, I think it is somewhat unusual that they offer happy hour specials, but hey, everything is possible in Vegas, right?
Taking advantage of my prior experience, I was determined to visit Stripsteak, one of Michael Mina’s restaurants (I ate there a few years back during the happy hour, and I had happy memories – oops, happy = happy, interesting). On the way to Stripsteak, we passed by Aureole, a Charlie Palmer’s restaurant, and stopped by to admire the wine tower:
Yeah, one day [may be, may be] I will order some wine there, but not now… Then we had to stop by the restaurant called Red Square and take look at the Lenin’s statue – very appropriate, right? Too bad we had no time to visit their Vodka cave – considering everything we didn’t do this time in Las Vegas, I think we already have full agenda lined up for the next visit.
At most of the happy hours, the restaurants are offering beer, wine and cocktails at some reasonable price ($6 wine and cocktail, $3 beers) – all with limitations, of course, plus some food items. At Stripsteak, I had a glass of Oberon Cabernet Sauvignon (very good!), and my wife enjoyed the cocktail. We also got a couple of small plates from the bar menu, and sliders were particularly good.
The break is over, and we need to get back to our program. Next on the list? Cirque de Soleil “O” show at Bellagio. First, of course, is getting there. This time we decided on the taxi. Excellent choice, took us only 25 minutes to drive about 2 miles. Note to self – “it is Friday night, stupid”. Once at Bellagio, you start getting acquainted with the place by admiring amazing glass chandelier which is literally the first thing you see after walking in. It is created by the world famous glass artist Dale Chihuli, and you can spend quite a bit of time adoring the magnificent exuberance. My pictures will not do justice to it, but remember, I told you before – I took pictures and I want to share them, so here you go:
and a little zoom:
Our next step was to pickup tickets for the performance – I ordered tickets in advance over the internet. Yes, you might be able to get the tickets when you are in Vegas (they also offer half price tickets, similar to New York’s Broadway tickets at TKTS) – depending on the show, you might or might not be successful getting the tickets exactly when you want them, so if you plan your trip in advance, I also recommend getting tickets as part of your trip planning. Yes, there were few empty seats at that “O” show we watched later on, but very few of them.
We had a little time left after we got the tickets, so we went to see the Conservatory – a free attraction at Bellagio which definitely should be on your “must see” list for Vegas. The Conservatory is changed a few times a year, depending on the season, and now theme was “harvest”, and it was absolutely magnificent, with talking tree, pumpkin swans, grape presses and many more elements pretty much forcing a “wow” or “just look at that” sensation out of you:
The Cirque de Soleil “O” was amazing, an incredible combination of water, acrobatics and breath-taking movements you can’t even believe a human can do – but you can find plenty of references and professional reviews for that without me, so let me get back to the description of our day (now evening, to be more precise).
As soon as we walked out, we saw the taxi line. Let me tell you – it was endless. We walked and walked and walked alongside of it, and we couldn’t understand where does it actually start. Okay – but we still had our monorail day passes, remember? So monorail it was.
And you know what? Whatever happens is for the better (at least I think that this is a very helpful attitude in life) – as we started making our way towards monorail entrance, first we could fully admire Las Vegas at night. Las Vegas is beautiful during the day, but it is simply stunning during the night, the way all the buildings are lit:
And then – music and the “wow” exhorted by many people at once – as Bellagio fountains came to life. These pictures will not do the justice to the art of water, light and music, but at least you will get an idea:
About 15 minutes later, monorail entrance was reached and (mini quiz – how long did it take us from the “monorail” sign until we got to an actual train? If you said “about 25 minutes”, pat yourself on the back as you are correct!) we are finally on the train.
Another walk (much shorter) and we are at the tram entrance – before we get inside, I simply had to take one more picture – this is Excalibur, which looks simply like a giant toy, isn’t it?
We got on the last tram (yay! I’m not sure what we would do if we would have to walk to our hotel) – and then we were finally back in our room. We both felt like our legs simply don’t belong to us and are hurting just to remind us that they exist.
We had to have a very early start next day, as we were taking a tour to the Grand Canyon, and considering our level of exhaustion, using an alarm clock was in order. My wife refused help I offered with the alarm clock and set it up on her own (she actually set an alarm both in the bedside clock and her phone), for us to wake up at 5:30 AM (we had to be at the “Tour and Travel” lobby by 6:05 AM for our tour pick up. After that, our tired bodies accepted sleep as a long anticipated blessing, without even saying “thank you”…
When I opened my eyes in the morning, the first thing I did was to grab my phone.
To be continued…
3 Days in Vegas – Day 1: Total Exhaustion, Part 1
Don’t know how many of you paid attention to the tag line in this blog – “wine, food and life”. Most of my posts are about wine (sometimes it is a life through the wine glass, but still). Some of my posts are more about food with some occasional wine inclusions. And very few of my posts here are just about life as it happens. Actually this is what this blog post is all about – and I’m pretty sure that one post will not do it (or it will be veeeeery loooong), so get ready to suffer. Besides the desire to share tons of pictures with you, I also want to share our (I traveled to Las Vegas with my wife, the trip was her birthday present) personal experience in Las Vegas – may be someone, somewhere, sometime, will find it useful. And without much ado, here we go.
Day 1 was Friday. Actually, the first day was Thursday, but by the time we arrived to the hotel, found out that we used the wrong lobby, waited for check in and then dragged ourselves through the whole casino floor and got to our room, it was pretty late (don’t forget to account for 3 hours time shift for our trip from East Coast). For those who are curious, we stayed at THEhotel at Mandalay Bay. THEhotel offers a full retreat from the casino noise and crowd, and rooms are extremely comfortable – if you are planning your own Vegas escape, I highly recommend it as a place to stay. Thus the only excitement of the day was my wife’s first encounter with the slot machine (she never been to Vegas before), which ended up very peacefully (actually, I’m still surprised that she didn’t win anything – I had drawn pretty big plans well in advance – oh well…).
So the real Day 1 started on Friday. Of course it started from breakfast. Let me digress for a second. I’ve been to Vegas numerous number of times before – but always on business. What it means is that I never really explored the town – but at least I had some ideas about food and ways to get around. Let’s go back to our day now. Based on my prior knowledge, I decided that buffet at MGM Grand would suit the breakfast bill quite well – and it did. At about $22 per person, the selection and quality was unbeatable. And all the deserts – yeah, I needed a lot of will power…
Breakfast is done, and let the explorations begin.
First decision you have to make is how to move around the town. While the distances are not huge, you have to take into account the weather – 100F is 100F – despite the fact that it is dry (!!!) heat, it is still a heat, so you need to make your selection wisely. Basically, your choices are: on foot, taxi, monorail and tram, which has very limited connectivity (of course you are right – there are private cars and limos of all shapes and sizes – but considering our uneventful/non-winning casino experience, this was really not an option). There might be buses too, but that is something which requires way too much knowledge in my opinion, so this option was out. If I would look back on our Day 1, here are few notes which might be useful for you. Taxi is probably the fastest way of transportation, and it is reasonably inexpensive outside of peak hours (6-9 PM) – about $10 – $15 will get you between any of the casinos on the strip. This is not true during peak hours, as you will wait quite long in line, and it will cost you more due to the wait on all the traffic lights. And this is especially not true if there is a big convention in town (CES, for instance) or if you need to move around on Friday or Saturday night (the wait in line will be killing).
Here is a view of the strip for you, not very busy as you can see:
And here is another view – casino New York New York:
If you are going to explore on foot – make sure your shoes are super-comfortable, you have plenty of water and you are in a good physical shape – your walking will include not only the street walking, but also walking to the different attractions inside the casinos, where the distances can be quite overwhelming.
Monorail is probably the most misleading type of transportation in Vegas. Before your eyebrows hit the ceiling, let me explain. When you look on the huge street sign “Monorail Entrance”, you think you are actually going to walk in and within a minute or two you will find the train? Nooooo. You are simply entering the casino. A huge one in most of the cases. And then inside the casinos, I think the way signs are done is to make you wonder around for as long as possible – they don’t want you to get from point A to point B unfrustrated. You get inside, and you see a directional sign for Monorail. You follow that sign until you get to the next one, most likely with the change of direction. And then… yep, you see no signs for Monorail anymore. It’s there, but now you are on your own. Figure it out. Or else… So remember that monorail is not just monorail – it also includes lots (and lots) of walking. Otherwise it is very reasonably priced ($5 single ride, $12 is unlimited day pass, and three days unlimited pass is $28) – if you don’t mind lots of walking and good amount of frustration, it is great.
And tram? Actually I think tram is the best – it is free, the train is actually located within less than a minute walk from the entrance and it is easy to find. But – there are few short tram routes, connecting casinos which are located near by in any case, and it has limited hours of operation (stops at 10:30 pm) – still, it can be very convenient.
Considering amount of explanations I gave you here, you can figure out that our first day included all of the above mentioned “getting around” methods. First we walked from Mandalay Bay to MGM Grand. Then we took Monorail from MGM Grand to Bally’s, as our destination was The Venetian near by – a famed casino with gondola ride inside.
Now, this gondola ride is listed in the “attractions” section of any of the Las Vegas guides – so let me share with you a few thoughts about attractions. We can split Las Vegas attractions into two groups – free and paid for. Pretty much every casino has a free attraction. A number of casinos have also attractions you can pay for. No matter what attraction you want to visit, my advise to you is simple – RTFM! Not familiar with the term? Use google, it will help you. What I mean is that even if attraction is free, it doesn’t mean that it is open when you want to visit it. We wanted to see Sirens of TI at Treasure Island – walked all the way from Venetian to Treasure Island only to find out that Sirens of TI operates only after 7 PM.
At this point I became smarter and checked the guide regarding Volcano at Mirage (that was our next planned stop) – yep, also open only in the evening, so at least we managed to avoid some additional frustration.
Now, when it comes to the paid attractions, such as Gondola ride at The Venetian – you will have to make your own decision. After looking at the gondola ride on the artificial channel under a painted sky with kind of artificial singers, we decided that $64 is too much for the pleasure and decided to skip it – of course there were plenty of people happily getting their share of artificial Venice.
Here are couple of flowers for you. Why? Because I love taking pictures of the flowers, and I promised to inundate you with pictures:
And a close-up:
To describe events in more chronological order, it was walk around The Venetian, skipping the gondola ride, walking to the Treasure Island, walking around and finally finding Sirens of TI, RTFM moment, canceling walk to Mirage and finally the understanding that we are sufficiently tired at that point, and we have to get back to our hotel.
“Here”, I said, “see, we already entering the monorail!”.
To be continued…
Last Bottle Sign Up ($10 credit)
Talk-A-Vino 