My bag is really heavy: 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