We were planning on flying into North Las Vegas instead of driving all the way there, but the terrible winds that finally passed through Ridgecrest were still howling in Vegas. At noon on Saturday, the winds were still strong and they were forecasting turbulence. The weather as forested to improve throughout the weekend so we would have been fine coming back. We could have flown to Vegas, but it would have not been the best flight, so we decided to drive. This also gave us some flexibility while we were there since we would have a car and not have to take a taxi everywhere.
We risked taking the I-15 through Barstow on a holiday weekend since we were leaving pretty late in the day. The traffic was pretty busy, but never slowed down and were were there in 3.5 hours. We checked in and took a tour around the MGM and decided to eat at Diego's for dinner. This was a fancy Mexican restaurant, the food was great. On the way back from dinner we found an arcade and I got to fly an airliner (I just sat there, I didn't actually play it).
Sunday, we decided that we would take advantage of being in a big city and go start our baby registries. I know I know, why were we doing baby registry stuff on our anniversary. Here's the thing, it's a 2 hour drive each way for us to do it another weekend and would have taken an entire day after doing the registries and eating. First we went to Baby's R Us (couldn't figure out how to type a backwards R), this took FOREVER since you have to go through the ENTIRE store and I have no idea what half of the stuff is. I'm sure I'll figure it out when I have to, but for now, I really don't know the difference between one bath thing or the other.
After Baby's R Us, we went to BW3 (Buffalo Wild Wings) for lunch and to watch the Packers! They put the Packers on the big screen and we were able to stay and watch the whole game. I can't believe how much food we ate there, but man was it good. After lunch we headed to Target to finish our registry there. This one was much quicker since you only have to worry about the baby section, not the whole store. While Michelle was looking at some toys, the dogs started acting up. They are pretty upset that we are having a kid and managed to convince me that the least I could do was to put some stuff on the baby registry for them...
After Target, we headed to the Rio to pick up our Penn & Teller tickets since the required that you pick them up at least an hour in advance. We got there around 6:30 and the show started at 9:00, but you had to be there 30 minutes early for seating so we decided to just stay at the Rio instead of going to the MGM and coming back. Not a big deal, but it would have been nice to sit down and relax for a bit, and we could have got our camera. To waste the time, we went to a restaurant for drinks and desert since we were still full from lunch. We got an Apple Streusel with ice cream that was incredible and I got to have an Alaskan Amber. Yes I just listed the beer I drank because it is a big deal; we just don't get good beer in Ridgecrest.
After desert we decided to gamble a little bit. All of the blackjack tables were $25 minimum so we skipped that. The roulette tables were $2 minimum so that was better, until we realized that it really wasn't $2 minimum as we thought. It was $10 minimum per spin, but you could have down to $2 per spot on the numbers as long as you had at least $10 total. That was more than we wanted to spend so we chipped out without playing at all. We headed over to the big wheel that Michelle talks about a lot. It's just like roulette, but it only has 1s, 2s, 5s, 10s, 20s, and 40s. If you pick 1 and it lands on 1, then you get paid 1:1, if you pick a 10 and it lands on a 10, you get paid 10:1, etc. This was fun for awhile, Michelle lost $10 and I was even with $20. As we were going to cash out we passed the roulette table again and Michelle said what the heck give it a shot. As I was down to the last $5, I hit where I was playing 4 numbers so I got paid out 8:1. Long story short we won in Vegas again even if it was only $5.00! On the gambling topic, I've got no poker stories since I didn't want to ditch Michelle on our anniversary although she did bring a bunch of grading to do in the hotel and said I could go play.
The Penn & Teller show was great. I'm really glad we saw them since they were very funny in addition to their magic. The thing I thought was the most funny was how they would redo tricks while explaining them and you would still be fooled! Of course some of the audience stunts, you wonder if they planted people, but some of them didn't matter. They had one where an audience guy transformed into Teller, didn't matter if he was planted or not. The show did seem a little short at just over an hour, but I had more than my money's worth of entertainment and was very happy about our choice for our first Vegas show.
Monday morning we went to the Rainforest Cafe for breakfast and then headed to the MGM Lion Habitat. This was pretty cool and you got to walk right under the lions. There was only 2 lions on display today and some of their lions are direct descendants of the original MGM lion. The trainers walk around in the habitat right next to the lions since they are so domesticated. It was cool to watch the lions nuzzle their trainers. The gift shop had all sorts of neat safari stuff and we bought a few things that we will use to decorate the kids room including a giraffe picture frame and a monkey. No we didn't get any lion stuff from the lion habitat because the only cool lion they had was really expensive.
After seeing the lions, we checked out and headed for home. Knowing the 15 would be terrible today, we headed north and headed through death valley via Beatty. We were home in just over 4 hours, but we stopped to get cheap gas in Beatty. If we didn't stop, I think we would have made it in 4 hours, which is pretty quick for the death valley route.
Feel good......
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