Las Vegas, November 2005

Kenny and I spent November 14th through the 19th in Las Vegas. It was both of our first time there. It was, to put it bluntly, fanfuckingtastic. Kenny was attending work-related conferences and expos throughout the days, which is why we went on the trip in the first place. With his flight and hotel paid for, it seemed like a good idea to pay for my flight (no extra cost for my staying in his hotel room) and make the most of the nights Kenny had free.

Kenny's dad Ken Senior and step-mom Diana met up with us there, as did Marvin/boredlurker/Mark. It was the best group of people to spend time with in Vegas.

Kenny and I arrived late on a Monday night, and our hotel room was at the Wynn. This hotel is pretty new, and has the most incredible bathrooms. Glass showers and a deep, gorgeous bathtub nearby. The toilet is in its own private room, right off the shower/bath area. Double sinks with bunches of lights and even a vanity table area.

The view from the window in the sleeping area, which could be seen by pressing a button near the bed which drew the huge drapes as well as the sheer curtains, was so breathtaking that I often sat at the little table near the windows just to look outside.




One of the days, a maid knocked on the door and I guess she was wondering why I was sitting there with no tv or music on just looking out the window. I think she worried I was upset or something. I told her sometimes I just like to sit quietly, as with three kids it's not usually that quiet at home during the daytime. She totally understood then, and talked about her own kids. She also told me that in her many years working in Las Vegas that she had only gambled $20.00 total. She talked about walking to work, and how she liked her job, but sometimes found it a pain in the rump to spend all day doing a job she liked only to come home and have to clean there, too. We laughed about the never-ending dishes and laundry and daily chores of being a mom. She sounded like a single-mom, I didn't ask, though, but she had a far away look in her eyes when I told her about Kenny and why we both were here in Las Vegas. She said I was blessed to have such a great husband, and she said she could see in my face how much I was happy with him, and I guess I'd been looking out the window rambling on about Kenny for longer than I realized, because when I turned to look at her she was sitting on the edge of the bed listening to me go on and on. Or maybe she was suggesting something kinky, like me and her getting all frisky on the bed, but I don't think so.

We ate at so many different places, but the ones that stick out are the breakfast buffet at the Tropicana and a dinner buffet at The Sahara (I think it was at the Sahara.) The shows that we saw were fantastic; The Amazing Johnathan (although, having seen him before for much cheaper, I can say those tickets were obnoxiously over-priced at 60 bucks a head, as the show was pretty much the same as the numerous times we saw him in Rhode Island), Blue Man Group (I kissed Kenny during the party-wrap covering, which felt like it happened in a dream) and the lights at the Bellagio (free show every night, water, lights and music.) We took a gondola ride at the Venetian, saw an incredible show at the Tropicana called Air Play (also free, which is part of the Las Vegas appeal... there's so much to do, drink and eat for free!). That show, Air Play, keeps coming back to me in little daydreams, as a festive version of Viva Las Vegas played and some guy was spinning around this huge metal square piece. I keep seeing that part of the show in my head, on rewind-replay. I think it's because of the song itself and the way the crowd was clapping in unison... it was just a really fun moment for everybody there, and I like moments like that.

Mark and I spent a good portion of Wednesday tooling around in search of a cache with my gps unit. I was suprised how many geocachers have put caches in Vegas. We only had time to do the one we did, and we only had enough time to do it because we took a cab to do it in. With me behind the driver, gps unit held out the window, we told the driver where to go. Thankfully, this led to hearing the magic words you want to hear in Vegas "I never did something like this before,", which was said by the cab driver. I heard that phrase during me and Kenny's gondola ride when I offered to pay twenty bucks to the guy paddling our gondola around if he'd lean down and plant a kiss on Kenny's mouth while we were under the small bridge and inside the tunnel. I could tell by Kenny's face he was nervous the gondola guy was going to take me up on the offer, which of course had me laughing so hard inside I almost peed, but the gondola guy said "I've not been asked that before," paused and then said, "make it a hundred and we'll talk." Hahaha!

Mark and I, on our geocaching adventure, ended up at the University of Las Vegas. As we walked around aimlessly, my gps unit once again giving me false info about the location of the cache, which makes it really challenging and has sorta become part of the fun and 'drive-you-nuts' aspect of geocaching, a female student sat watching Mark and I and I noticed she hadn't turned any pages in the book she was reading for well over ten minutes. I suspected that perhaps she's the one who created the cache, so I just walked up to her and asked her if she knew the general area of where the cache was. She asked what we were looking for, and I explained geocaching to her, but as she then walked right up to the cache, Mark and I have since speculated that she very well could be the cache's owner. Or, maybe not... could be she was just a lucky muggle. :) Because we'd been walking for over half an hour prior to finally getting a cab, and walking all day before that, and walking around the campus for another half an hour, Mark and I sat on a curb and called a cab, which didn't work out so good as we accidently gave the cab company the wrong street. So, we walked up to a huge casino/hotel and just got a cab from there.

I had to meet Kenny back at the hotel because we had a work-dinner function to go to, which ended up being at this really fancy place with lots of silverware and thick cloth napkins and a bunch of different glasses and no prices on the menu. I embarrassed the hell out of myself afterwards, when I went outside for an after dinner smoke. Sitting on the edge of the curb, as I took my last drag from the cigarette, I saw a group of people walk out, most of whom I recognized from the dinner party. The two men in front, whom I didn't recognize but were walking out with our group, started to walk by me, so I rose up and said "Time to go, guys? Where to now?" and they said "Yeh, it's time to go, let's go!" and sounded semi-intoxicated and frisky. Looking over at Kenny and the group near the entrance to this place, I realized that the two guys in front of me were NOT a part of the dinner group, and I got beet red in the face and said "Oh, yikes, wrong group, sorry!" and quickly skipped over to Kenny and the fancy dinner gang. :smacks forehead:

We gambled quite a bit, mostly me during the days Kenny was the conventions, but not too much money, we didn't come home flat broke.

Here's some more pictures from the trip:



Here's a picture of me that Kenny took on one of the days we were walking around the Las Vegas strip...





Here's a picture of Mark taking a picture of me taking a picture of him:









Here's a picture of the hotel we stayed at:



We found out on the last day there that the conference is being held in Vegas again next year... odds are pretty high that I'll go with Kenny again. There's still so much to see and do, so many baseball card sized pornography to collect from the sidewalks and on bus stop booths. I also didn't get to see the shark at the aquarium, and we even had that on our list of 'gotta do'.

I guess that's why they call Vegas the Disney World for adults. You go there once, and before you even leave you're planning a trip back to it.

I give Vegas a 10/10 for everything it has to offer. People seem to really like their jobs, so customer service in every aspect and at every venue is high rate. All of the free things to do make it worth going just for that aspect. The casinos are all very clean and even if you don't win money, you have a great time blowing cash. It's exciting. And for people watchers, like me, it's one of the best cities to experience.

The oddest thing I saw, though, wasn't something during people watching. As I was walking down to the Sahara one of the days, I came across a banana, fully ripened, and unpeeled, sitting on top of a shrubbery in front of a fence where construction was going on. I've often thought about that banana, too. Who put it there, and why?

It was a perfect banana, no brown lines or bruising, a nice yellow. And there it sat, on a pine-type bush that hadn't much been tended to during the construction of some huge building behind it. It looked so out of place, but reminded me of all the breakfast buffets. Here's the stories I came up with for the banana... somebody was at a breakfast buffet. They put a banana in their pocket for later on in the day. Later, while walking the strip, they began to feel guilty for taking a banana from a breakfast buffet, planning to eat the banana as a snack before lunch. So, instead of carrying around that guilty banana, they layed it on the bush, to get rid of it and their guilt.

Or, maybe it wasn't like that... maybe somebody got nervous that the banana was in the shape of a gun and that they'd be rushed by security when entering a casino. They put the banana in the bush so as not to arrouse any terrorist warnings.


Or, maybe somebody had been getting approached every day on the strip by the homeless people who ask for money for food. So maybe every day they were in Vegas they took a banana from their hotel's breakfast tray and put it out on the bush for a hungry homeless person.

I'll most likely never find out what really happened with that banana... but my life has led me to be ok with not knowing for sure about some things. I know all my ideas about the banana might be wrong, but I like to try to figure stuff out. Even if I didn't like trying to figure stuff out, my mind would just run with things like bananas on shrubbery anyways. So, that's just the way it is, inside my head. :)

On a final note, we did get to eat at In and Out burger. It really does have the best hamburgers and french fries I've ever tasted, aside from my dad's backyard grill. I even got a paper hat from there.

It's snowing today in Cape Cod... and right now in Vegas, it's just 46 degrees and somewhat windy. I remember the gondola guy told us about it snowing in Vegas one year. It didn't last long... but was very pretty and nice when it happened. That's how our visit there felt. :) Viva Las Vegas, yep. Viva. Viva. Las Vegas.