VEGAS BABY

After another long haul flight, we are seriously over flying, and we land ready to enjoy Vegas, with the knowledge we have our longest flight yet - from LA to Sydney, 14.5hours - still to come.

We land, check in to our hotel, the LUXOR, which is a giant pyramid, that beams a powerful light directly into the sky at night. It looks sick, we can't believe we are staying in a pyramid. But we are to exhausted from our flight to do much, so we take a wonder around the hotel and casino we are staying in, and then crash out.

We wake up the next day and decide to walk the strip, and we spot the Hardrock, and decide to have lunch there. So we order our food and what not, and they come, and the plates and portions are huge, and we only ordered off the entree menu, this would be a taste of what it was like ordering American food, where everything is huge, and the people are all fat. Anyway, the food was nice and the place was dope, and the waitress told Katie that her "kicks were tight", translated that means, her shoes are cool.

After woods, we headed down stairs, and signed up for the "Hardrock pub crawl", that would take us around all the cool clubs finishing at Studio 54, and then signed up for a helicopter ride in a few days time to fly us to the Grand Canyon, past Hoover dam and over Lake Mead, landing inside the canyon for lunch. Shit sounded exciting!

The chick at the helicopter thing, gave us the down low on what to check out on the strip while were here in regards to the free street shows, but they are all on at night, so firstly we walked the whole strip, many kilometers, all the way up past Circus Circus and back again, checking out the various hotels along the way.

Then when night time comes you apparently you start at Treasure Island, to watch the Sirens of TI show, which we went and saw, and it was really cool, heaps of fireworks and ships sailing on lakes with water exploding, dancing girls, and pirates, was really cool.

You then head south to the Mirage to watch the Volcano show out the front, which was also cool, but difficult for me to explain what it was, basically just red looking water exploding up out of huge rocks to the tune of music.

We then went into the Caesar Forum shops, which was just next to the Mirage, and part of Caesars Palace that was full of really expensive shops like Gucci, Prada, Pandora, etc. to see the moving statues. Which was rubbish, don't bother, I'm not even going to explain it.

Then we went and saw the Bellagio fountains that were in the movie Oceans 11, and they are really cool, the lake they are in is massive, and its really awesome to see these huge fountains dancing to music, we saw it from the back side, not front on, but it wasn't bad, because the hotel Paris, with the Eiffel tower was the background for us. It was really pretty.

After this, we were exhausted after having walked the whole strip up and down, it took all day, and we still didn't see everything.

So we crashed.

The next day we headed down to a shop I'd seen where you could hire 'dream cars', and my plan was to hire a Dodge Viper and burn around, but they were really expensive to hire and they didn't have any in that day, so then I wanted a Corvette, but they were all hired out as well, so in the end I hired a Porsche 996 Cabriolet for 5 hours.

So here I am, driving a super expensive Porsche on the wrong side of the road, straight out onto busy as fuck Las Vegas Boulevard (aka the strip), I go to change gears, and start winding the window down, the gear stick is on the other side, fuck! So after quickly getting used to it, and Katie struggling with the shitty map they gave us at the shop we eventually find out way out of town and into the desert.

But before we got all the way out of town, a big 4x4 pulls up next to us honking, and yelling at us "YOUR WEAVING, YOUR TAKING UP TWO LANES", we were like fuck, sorry, and I try to drive the car so I stay in my lane, its not easy driving on the wrong side of the road, especially not in a super expensive Porsche where the controls are all weird, but I eventually got the hang of it.

We go to Red Rock Canyon national park and drive around there 13km loop road, and its really awesome, and we took lots of photos of ourselves looking cool with our Porsche. Then burned back to town, stopping by "Chillis" for lunch.

Shit was cash.

Then I heard the best news of the trip. My mate Stibs was in Vegas, so we made contact, met up with him and his mates, and hung out drinking with them all night in there sick sick apartment that overlooked the strip. It was very Vegas.

After recovering from our hangover the next day, we ate some concrete for breakfast, shook off what was left of our hangovers, and went on the Vegas pub crawl.

I remember very little of this though, I remember thinking the music at every club was shit, and the clubs were all shit, and standing in the middle of Las Vegas boulevard arguing with a taxi driver and it went something like this
Taxi Man - "I can't stop in the middle of the road man!"
Me - "Its OK! I'm getting in!"
And then I just stood there in front of his taxi
then the taxi man continues
 - "I HAVE to get off the road man"
Me - "Don't worry man I'm getting in"

I must have told him I was getting in his taxi 5 or so times, while he was blocking traffic. I dont know why I did this, its just one of the few memories I have of the night. We met a cool American couple, and got really drunk and danced.

Katie and I are both of the consensus that Vegas clubbing is rubbish. I'd rather go out in the Valley.

Anyway, the next day we had the helicopter. Which was awesome. and I'll let the photos speak for themselves. What I will say though is that the helicopter pilot still asks for tips, after we've spent an outrageous amount of money paying for this trip to begin with. I find it outrageous that they can ask for a tip, when between us this is costing the better half of a grand. Fuckers.

That night we went hit old Vegas. And man, we wish we had have done that a lot sooner. As it is so much cheaper to eat, gamble and what not. They have shut Fremont street (old vegas) off to cars, and built a massive dome over the top that flashes all these pretty lights that sometimes dance to music and stuff. Looks really cool.

And when I say cheaper, I mean WAY cheaper, like $2 coronas, whereas when Katie bought 4 Heinekens and 1 bottle of California wine, it cost $60US dollars from a bottle-o in the Luxor. Outrageous. Everything on the strip is SO expensive. Which is one of the reason old vegas is so much better.

This night we went out and played some poker, I was up about 100 bucks, and got sick of playing because some spoon from LA, went all in blind like 7 times in a row, buying back in at the max 300 every time, and lost every time. Probably watched this stooge lose like 2k on the tables, you can't play normal poker against someone like that. Where as Katie hung around and the spoon left, and she ended up making about 700 bucks. She is without doubt the luckiest card player I've ever met, its certainly not "skill" like she says, its all luck.

And that was it, the next day we had our plane home. The epic journey has come to an end. I hope you have enjoyed the blog. I've really had to make myself write it sometimes, as I don't always want to sit in front of the computer and type stuff out, but I think its for the best, everyone can see what we've done, and in the future we'll be able to look back on this trip and refresh out memories.

Thanks to Katies parents for picking us up from the airport, and thanks to Alana, my travel agent for organising this amazing trip for us, and thanks for reading this blog!

I will be doing one more post which will include videos and pictures that I haven't put up, as a sort of summery of the trip post. But I'm not doing that today, sometime in the next week I'll get around to that. I'll post on facebook when that one goes up.

Until next time.

Peace

Here we go!

Flying over LA, biggest city I've ever seen

Pokie machines in the airport, you can see the baggage claim sign on the right

Inside the MGM Grand they have real lions!

Outside New York New York

Having lunch at the Hard Rock

Again lunch at the Hard Rock, with New York New York and Exaliber in the background

The pirate show at Treasure Island

A ship sinking in the show, this is all out on the street, free for anyone to see

I just missed the shot, but this was fireworks going off in front of the Treasure Island sign on the hotel, as part of the show

The volcano show

In the Forum Shops, part of Caesars Palace, the flying horse was made of plastic. A good representation of how fake this town is.

This fish was in a the forum shops as well, and I took a photo of the fish because its forehead reminded me of Jordans forehead 

The Bellagio fountains from the back, with Paris and Ballys in view

The view from our hotel window

Burning through the desert in our Porsche

Red Rock Canyon

Buckle up Kev.

The Excaliber, this was next to the Luxor

New York, New York

Hoover Dam

Flying inside the canyon

Landing inside the canyon

Was cool standing inside the canyon

There are heaps of these things down there, apparently they are chipmunks

Driving back to Vegas from the helicopter thing, this is the view of the city from the highway on the way in

The Luxor from the front, you can see the Pyramid behind the Sphinx

Fremont street, see what I mean with the "dome" they built above the street

European Dregs

So we headed to Innsbruck. Had to catch a train to Munich and switch to go to Innsbruck. Train was delayed (surprise surprise), and we had to wait a couple of hours in Munich for the next train to Innsbruck. Wasn't all bad though, got to go out for a quick look at the main street of Munich. Aside from the fact Octoberfest was on, city looked relatively uninteresting, and alas we moved on. Arriving in Innsbruck late at night.

We stayed at a youth hostel, and slept like logs, tired from our Prague adventures, and missing the clown and bard hostel and its "character" - Katie insists I mention how awesome George the bartender was.

Awakening the next day, fresh and ready to go. We decided to head out to one of the many glaciers in the region, the closest one was the "Stuby" glacier, as we called it, and it lay about an hour out of town, so we caught the bus, checking out the amazing scenery on the way. As it was raining, many waterfalls appeared everywhere in the cliffs around us, which was amazing. Then when we got there it takes a 40 minute chairlift ride, on these space aged chairlifts to get to the top. You then walk the last 100 or so meters up some stairs to reach the top. Which at 3200m is pretty high. Unfortuantly the weather was totally pox, so we only caught a few fleeting glances of the mountain ranges, and the glacier itself, but none the less it was cool (no pun intended), and we went down the stairs to the pub/cafe to have a beer at 3100m AMSL.

This was the first time Katie had also seen snow, but the snow was more like snow/slush, and just like on Kilimanjaro, was another half assed attempt at snow.

We then had to decided what we wanted to do next with our time here at Innsbruck, as we had visited at a time when most of the summer activities are finished, but the winter ones hadn't started yet, because the snow hadn't arrived yet. It was supposed to come "any day now" according to the guy on the Stuby glacier. One of the things that looked promising was the paragliding, so we checked the forecast, and the next day it was supposed to be perfect, with clear skies, so we decided to book it in.

And we were stoked we did. Old mate Rayman the Austrian, came and picked us up from the hostel and drove us out to were we would be jumping from. We would be jumping from 1790m ASML, from a ridge that a chairlift took us to, and then off the side into the valley below (where all the towns are).

Raymond was a cool cat, and gave us all these facts about the area and paragliding, and his best student was supposed to be turning up in a bit to take the other one of us. Its a tandem jump sort of affair. So while we were waiting for old mate who was running a bit behind, Raymond was running Katie through everything, suiting her up in a jump suit, telling her to do this and that when they were in the air. Then Mardys bloke rocks up, doesn't say shit, don't put on a jump suit, just get in the harness and we were airborne in 2 minutes right after Katie and Raymond had taken off. And I'm not gonna lie it was fun, like, a lot of fun, you burn really close to the mountains. The valleys in the mountain side are where the hot air gather we were told, and thats what gives the parachute its lift, and you can feel it as you go over these valleys, a huge surge of air pulls you up; awesome feeling.

And we were very lucky that the weather held out, because we had some AMAZING views, it was a beautiful day and we were very glad we did it, and good thing too, as it would rain in town the next couple of days.

We then spent the next day relaxing, which was very much needed. And we googled the prices on stuff in Switzerland, and we were blown away by how expensive EVERYTHING is there, so we changed our plans, and decided to stay in Innsbruck till the last possible day and then head to Zurich, so we only had to spend one night there.

The rest of the time in Innsbruck we chilled out, went to a rockclimbing hall one day, and another day I decided to go up to another glacier called the "Hintertux glacier" to have a look at some ice caves they had there, while Katie just hung out in town. The lady in the email said that the Hintertux glacier was about 1.5 hours out of town. Well 3.5 hours later and after 2 buses and 2 trains, I still didn't make it there, because when it was raining in the city, it was hard out snowing like a blizzard up in the mountains, and they closed the road, so I had to head straight back. So I didn't get to see the glacier or any ice caves and spent the whole day on the road, but I did get to see the snow transform the landscape, it was an insane turnaround from how great the weather was when we went paragliding.

We did some shopping the next day, and caught the train the day after to Zurich.

We then did some shopping in massively overpriced Zurich, bought a Swiss army knife, and then got 2 beers at a local pub, which cost 12AUS DOLLARS EACH ARE YOU JOKING. Went back to the hostel were the beers were cheaper, found some other Australians and drank at the bar. As Katie said, we missed talking to other Australians.

We would be glad to leave Zurich, it is completely crazy how expensive everything is there. You can't even go to McDonalds on the cheap, as they have inflated prices. "Fuck Zurich" became our mantra.

And thus we boarded a plane to a bright light city that was going to set our soul on fire.

Not the best day to head up the glacier 

The space age chairlift was long and huge, took 40minutes to go up! 

Kev at the Stuby glacier 

At 3200m at the top of the glacier

Innsbruck - Austria, absolutely beautiful place

The chairlift that took us to where we went paragliding from

Katie suited up and Raymond giving her instruction on what to do in case of emergency (I'm assuming it was something along the lines of  making sure her tray table was stowed and her chair was in the upright position, because my dude didn't tell me shit)

Paragliding!! That's Katie off to the left, and yes the colours really are that amazing there

Katie

Mad tilt, overlooking the valley with the Stuby glacier in the distance

The parachute

Innsbruck city

The failed Hintertux Glacier exploration lead me into this blizzard

This all happened in a day! Perisher, eat your heart out

The view from our hostel, you can see the snow line just a few hundred meters up the mountains

On the train on the way to Zurich, picturesque Hilti factory. Not surprising I can't afford there drills in Australia, let alone anything in Switzerland