The big one, part deux

Another big long post is in the works, with more pictures!  This time I’ll be focusing on the honeymoon, as promised.  We took so many pictures that I hate to think how much it will cost to get them all printed (seriously, folks, we’re talking upwards of 500).  And now, without further ado, le post!

So we left for Las Vegas the Monday following the wedding.  And boy, did we leave early!  Our flight had been scheduled to depart at 6:30 a.m. with a layover in Salt Lake City, but that flight got cancelled and they put us on one that left at 2:00 a.m.  Then something happened with that flight and we got rebooked onto another flight that left at 6:45 a.m….with a layover in Memphis.  Apparently you just have to fly east in order to go west.  At any rate, we got on the plane without incident, except for me panicking that we were going to miss our flight.  I had never flown before, so I might have been a little nervous (okay, a lot nervous – Greg jokingly says his arm still hurts).  But we landed in Memphis on time and nothing happened, so when we left from there, I was a little less nervous.  Heck, by the time we hit Vegas, I was even looking out the windows!   We really lucked out in Memphis, though, because the gate we needed to leave from was literally right across from the gate we came into.  Talk about lucky!

The airport in Las Vegas is huge.  I’d never ridden a tram like that before, either, so as we were riding the tram to the bus that took us to the rental car place, I kept picturing the scene on the subway from Rent:

We’ll pack up all our junk and fly so far away
Devote ourselves to projects that sell
We’ll open up a restaurant in Santa Fe
And forget this cold Bohemian Hell

Once we got our car from the rental place, we headed for the Strip and found our hotel.  We stayed at the Luxor, which was really cool.  Sad part of the trip – we missed my friend Amber by half an hour!  She was going to meet us for lunch but when they switched our flight I didn’t think we’d be able to make it work, so she dropped our wedding gift off at the hotel.  We discovered the near-miss when we got back and I called to thank her for the tickets to LOVE.  *sigh*

Okay, so Monday we didn’t do much.  We took in a timeshare presentation that got us tickets to Criss Angel and $75.00 worth of dining vouchers for $50.00.  The one salesman reminded me of a stereotypical used-car salesman.  He started off badly (by asking us if we were from Redneck, Ohio – apparently he doesn’t know how to read) and just went downhill from there.  Jerk.  After that, we went to one of the restaurants in the hotel and had supper before heading back upstairs and hitting the sack.

Tuesday we went to the Hoover Dam, which was incredible.  We spent the extra money and did the whole tour, so we got to go through the actual dam, which was really neat.  They took us down this little passageway that leads to one of the air vents partway up the dam and we had our picture taken:

This was the view from that air vent:

How cool is that?  I guess they’re building another highway there to ease congestion on the dam and that’s what you see in the background.  The tour guide said they had just completed the arch this summer.  This was such a great place to see!

After Hoover Dam, we drove to Red Rock Canyon, with a pit stop for lunch on the way.  I’d gotten a bit overheated, so water was a must-have.  Nothing like traveling all the way to Nevada to eat at Pizza Hut and Dairy Queen.   Anyway, after lunch we got back on the road to Red Rock and it was absolutely GORGEOUS!!!  They had some trails you could hike and we started one, but it was super windy and I was already having trouble with my contacts, so we ended up just doing the scenic drive-through.  It would have been so much fun to do the trails!  Maybe one day we’ll get back out there and be able to do some of the hiking we missed out on.  As it was, we got some great pictures (and a lot of pictures with glare from the windows and reflections and things like that):

 

When we got back from doing all that, we got cleaned up and headed down to another one of the many restaurants our hotel had to offer.  They have a buffet there called More, and we had eaten there for breakfast.  It was pretty good food; they have a special deal where you can get all you can eat all day long for only $30.00, which is what we did.  I made a meal out of shrimp cocktail (yummy!) and various desserts (double yummy!).  After everything we did Tuesday, we were pretty tired, so we spent the night enjoying the view from the hot tub, along with a bottle of champagne:

Wednesday we planned to go to the Grand Canyon and then see The Phantom of the Opera that night.  Instead, we went to Valley of Fire, part of Lake Mead, and Las Vegas Motor Speedway for the Nascar nut (clearly that’s not me – I usually nap through races).  Valley of Fire was absolutely beautiful and we got tons of great pictures, but all I have to say about Lake Mead is that they weren’t kidding when they said that southern Nevada was experiencing a drought.  While at the Hoover Dam, we learned that Lake Mead is the largest man-made lake in the U.S. and holds 9.2 trillion cubic feet of water.  We saw the part of it that lies behind the dam while we were there and then we saw another part of it after driving through Valley of Fire.  This part had a boat ramp, and since it looked positively dead, we drove down said boat ramp.  The ramp was quite long and I could see green in the distance, the first green I’d seen since leaving Des Moines.  Anyway, I figured it was just lake slime, like the stuff that covers Union Grove Lake by the end of every summer.  As we got closer, I realized I couldn’t have been more wrong, for what I saw was not lake slime, but the plant life that grows along the bottom of the lake – the part of the lake we were visiting had evaporated!  Since I am by nature easily amused, I took pictures:

 

On the way back to our hotel, we passed the turn-off for Las Vegas Motor Speedway and stopped to take a look.  Greg loves Nascar, so he was really excited.  He was even more excited when he found out at the gift shop that they offer guided tours every hour, on the hour.  He signed us up and we got to see the whole place, from the smaller tracks where they run different cars to the luxury boxes at the main track (the nice ones go for $140,000.00!) to the actual track itself.  Our tour guide took us out on the track and did a couple laps at about 60 mph, which terrified me – I can’t imagine taking those corners at three times that speed!  She also let us out on the track to get a picture, which was super cool (once she finally figured out how to use the camera):

 

Note: This is a terrible picture of me and we are quite high up, as the corners of the track (one of which we’re at the top of in the picture) are banked at 20°.  Also, I had to run up and down the width of the track several times in order to show our tour guide how to work the camera.  She eventually figured it out, but not before Greg and I ran up and down the track a total of six or seven times.

After all that excitement, we headed back to the hotel to get ready for the show that night.  The tickets Amber had gotten us were for Wednesday night for the Beatles  Love show at the Mirage, so that meant no Phantom of the Opera; we just didn’t have enough time.  But I digress.  We got cleaned up and headed down the Strip to the Mirage to see the show and IT WAS ALL SORTS OF AWESOMETOWN!!!!  Seriously, the show rocked.  An hour and a half of awesome Cirque du Soleil plus awesome Beatles music?  You just can’t go wrong with that!  The choreography was great, the music was great, the whole thing just rocked!  I don’t have enough good things to say about that show.  If you’re ever in Vegas, I highly recommend checking it out.

Thursday we just bummed around the hotel.  We were going to hit up the spa and get a massage because Greg had a two-for-one certificate, but then it turned out that that was for a trip to the sauna.  I don’t do sweating.  So instead, we checked out Bodies: The Exhibition and Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition, both of which were very good.  I liked the Titanic exhibit better than the other one, though.  The Titanic exhibit didn’t make me nautious and there were no skeletons of babies with birth defects.  (FYI, we skipped the room with the babies.  It was just too sad.)  In the afternoon, we took in a class on how to play craps, black jack, and roulette.  I had a hard time hearing and what I could hear, I had a hard time understanding, but that’s okay because gambling’s not really my thing.  We did get a total of $45.00 between the two of us from the hotel to gamble with, so we played a couple of slot machines and came out ahead.  Between our winnings from the machines and what Greg won playing black jack Friday morning, we came home with a little over $200.00.  Yay!

Thursday night we saw Criss Angel: Believe.  I was less than impressed.  It was another Cirque du Soleil show, but with him in there doing magic tricks every now and then.  The tricks that he did were impressive, and there are a couple that Greg still can’t figure out, but I was expecting more of a magic show.  Also, they had all these signs all over the place about how the show would start promptly at 7:00 p.m. and any late arrivals would be held in the lobby until an appropriate time during the show, no exceptions.  That’s exactly what the did at the Beatles show and it was wonderful.  Not so with Criss Angel!  Instead, they still had people wandering in after the show had started and about half a dozen of them were a couple rows ahead of us.  It took them  15 minutes to find their seats, using their cell phones to try to read the tickets.  Greg turned around and asked the usher to help them find their seats because they were in our way and we couldn’t see anything, but she just sniffed at him in disdain and went back to watching the show instead of doing her job.  Then there was the drunk lady next to me.  I was wearing a strapless dress and it was cold in the theater.  She, meanwhile, was hammered and had been clutching her icy cold drink as if her life depended on it for ten minutes before she grabbed my bare arm with her icy cold hand and asked if I was cold.  I said yes and continued ignoring her, which was rather difficult since she talked through the whole show and then got up toward the end and left before it was over.  At least it was quiet after that.

Friday morning, Greg got up early and hit the black jack tables before hitting the Star Trek machines:

When he was finished, we checked out of the hotel and complained about the show we’d seen the night before.  Of course, in order to complain, we had to wait in line forever for the manager, who was somehwere deep within the bowels of the hotel taking a phone call.  We got a bite to eat and hit the strip mall near the airport car rental place, where I got a snazzy new green purse and where we picked up a couple souvenirs, including one of those etched crystal things that had our hotel on it.  Then we headed back to the car rental place, dropped off our car, and caught the bus to the airport, where we caught a tram to wherever it was we were supposed to go in the monstrosity that is McCarran International Airport.

It’s a good thing we got there plenty early because we spent an hour waiting in line to get through the security checkpoint.  We finally got to our gate, only to discover that our flight was running late and they were reboarding the flight to Minneapolis that was supposed to have left at 11:00 a.m. that morning.  At this point, it was 2:00 p.m.  We tried to get on that flight, but the booking agents were annoyed and wouldn’t let us on, so we sat down to wait.  There was a flight to Detroit ahead of us and I guess the weather in this part of the country was really bad that day, which is why all the planes were late.  It was then that I finally broke down and bought a book to read, When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris.  So instead of leaving Las Vegas at 2:45 p.m. like we were supposed to, it was closer to 5:00 p.m. when we finally left.  We had a three-hour layover in Minneapolis, but we were still a little worried about catching our plane to Des Moines.  I spent the whole flight to Minnesota praying that our plane to Des Moines would be late and that we would luck out with gate numbers the way we did in Memphis.  I got the first wish, which was great because we landed in Minneapolis with seven minutes to get from one end of the airport to the other in order to catch our flight…and the tram was down.  We came in gate G2 and had to make it to gate A9.  We ran like the wind.  That is, we ran like the wind if the wind huffed and puffed and hollered for its new husband to slow down and wait up every five seconds as he flew through the airport carrying both our bags.  I am so pathetically out of shape.    Anyway, we managed to flag down a guy on a cart, who took us quite a ways through the airport, and we made it to our gate with about a minute to spare, only to find out that our plane wasn’t even there yet.  The booking agent must have felt really bad for us because he offered us his last can of Pepsi and Greg was so thirsty after running across the airport like that that he actually drank it (and he doesn’t like Pepsi at all).  We stood around chatting with some of the other passengers on our flight till the plane arrived and then we all hurried aboard; the captain wanted to take off again as soon as possible.  We ended up having to check our bags as we boarded the flight and Greg said when they told me I had to check my bag that I looked like they’d asked me to give up my first-born.  The overhead compartments on our flight back to Des Moines were itty-bitty, though, and almost everyone had to check their bags, even though we hadn’t had to check them previously.  The flight was a rough one, what with all the weather and everything, and when we landed they let us out right on the tarmac, where we had to wait for our bags to be unloaded.  It was just a tad windy out there and all I had on was my jean jacket, which wouldn’t have been so bad except that it was only 40° outside.  Once we found our bags, we headed for the parking garage and found our car.  I was so glad to be home that I didn’t care that it was another half hour to Greg’s parents, which is where we stayed for the night.  I think after all that, I can live without flying again for quite some time.

Oy!  I wasn’t kidding when I said this would be a long post.  And I don’t even have all the pictures uploaded yet!  Hopefully now that we’re all done with the moving and the wedding and the honeymooning, I’ll be able to post a little bit more often than I have been.  But for now, I suppose I should get back to work.  Later, gators!

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