Vegas Day 3

Photos

Thursday, November 14, 2013

Today we were up at 6:20am. Clay got up first and went right into the shower. We were mostly packed and went to Café Bellagio for breakfast. Clay had a traditional breakfast and I had raspberry French toast. I think we were both pleased. We went back up to the room and packed up and left. We settled up at checkout and were on the road before 8:30am.  (Look at Clay's 2 eggs. He says he wants to be able to cook his eggs like this at home. I told him to just not separate them, but he pointed out that he had to flip them as a single entity. He said he would try it at home. Well, on last Sunday, he took his little frying pan over to the sink and flipped his 2 eggs successfully! Yeah!)

We were at the Hoover Dam before 9:30am hoping to get a full dam tour. You have to drive through a security checkpoint to get to the parking lot. It costs $7 to park in the garage. The website said that there were a limited number of tours and you couldn’t book them online, only in person and to get there early. They opened the ticket line at 9am. We asked and were told we could only take the Power Plant tour. I asked why and she said they didn’t have enough guides to offer the dam tour. She acted like that was a full time state of things and there was no signage up offering the dam tour. Anyway. She sold us 2 Seniors tickets at $9 each. We both think we had done this tour before. Of course it had to be different because there was no bridge and the visitor’s center was also newly built since we were last here. It was good. It was interesting. There is very light traffic over the dam now since every car has to go through a security checkpoint to get there. We walked out on the new bridge to view the dam and the concrete walls on it are so tall that the cars on the bridge would never even know the dam was down there. Sad.

We drove back to Vegas and found the Ethel M Factory. The tour was free and brief because their manufacturing machine was broken. We saw some people covering apples with chocolate and a bunch of engineers tinkering and consulting each other over the machine and got a couple of free samples and that was that. Disappointing. We wandered their cactus garden which was just freaky because the cacti were all wrapped in Christmas lights, with lots of big Christmas lawn inflatables around. It was weird. Clay thought it would be cool to see it at night, but we won’t.

We drove on to The Mirage, our home for the next 2 nights. We easily found the self-park garage here. We had booked a Strip view room. We are in 9025.  I am looking out at Treasure Island and Wynn. Clay is on the bed and can see The Venetian across the street. We will be staying at The Venetian our last 2 nights. We booked this online at $449.12 for the 2 nights. There is a $25 resort fee per day on top of that at all the Vegas hotels. Our final invoice with some drinks, a meal and 2 Dolphin Habitat tickets shows we paid a total of $576.93 for the 2 nights.

The Mirage room is nice but our room smells musty and funky. It is smaller than Bellagio, but it is also less expensive. They have the same rules about not touching the fridge or snacks or being billed, with the same warnings. The bathroom is much smaller and has a shower over the tub. The sink is chest high on me again. What is going on with that? They have a Secret Garden from Siegfried and Roy and a Dolphin Habitat here that you can pay to visit. I think it is $19.95 and we can get a $3 discount with our room key and personal ID. We will plan to do that tomorrow. It looks like the Grand Canyon is about 8 hours roundtrip drive from here, so while Clay is interested in going, I am voting no. He wanted to go get a snack as soon as we got to the room. We went to Blizz, a frozen yogurt place here and had savory crepes. I had pepperoni pizza and Clay had BBQ chicken. They were $12.95 each and we probably should have just picked on and shared. They had $.69 an oz. make your own frozen yogurt sundae and we had small ones each worth $25 which was crazy. It was good though and Clay finished both. Then he wanted to go ahead and tour the garden and dolphins, but I said no, tomorrow. So, he has been sleeping and still is. I have been typing up these notes and watching it get dark and the Strip light up. The Mirage is supposed to have some kind of volcano show out on the Strip, like Bellagio’s fountains and if we’re going to see it we need to go do it before dinner. We just saw part of the 5pm show from our window but it is partially blocked by the glass dome of the lobby atrium. We’ll have to find out where one should go to actually view it. It looks like it is right on the sidewalk of the Strip and it is huge so I can’t imagine where you can nicely view it. It goes off on the hour from 5pm to maybe 11pm according to the website. We have very slow Internet here and there is no substantive hotel information to be found in our room.

In other news, Clay only brought his little pocket camera this trip to save space and for ease of use. It may be broken or just worn out. All the letters are worn off the controls for sure and you have no idea what function is active. Also, it only has a digital viewfinder and it is funky now! I see a new small camera in his future… Actually, he loaded the photo files to the computer and most of them after the funky screen appeared are no good, so it is not just the display. It is trash. He is trying to use his cellphone’s camera to little avail. Oh, well. I have asked him to just wait and get a replacement pocket camera as his big Christmas gift instead of shopping for one here and now. It turns out the poor little Olympus just really died on the trip and was trashed somewhere in Vegas. Clay has a new smallish Olympus he ordered online since he doesn't want to carry a big camera to California in December. Anyway, don't expect much in the way of photos for the rest of this Las Vegas trip report!

We have reservations here at FIN, a Chinese restaurant at 7pm. The doors open on Cirque du Soleil Beatles’ LOVE show at 9pm. The show starts at 9:30pm. I have somehow just discovered here at The Mirage that it is a 360 degree show. I don’t know or understand what that means but it does not sound comfortable again tonight! I hope the show is as good though. More later.

FIN was another overpriced disappointment for me. I don’t really know how well Clay liked it but we didn’t finish either of our meals and they were pretty small portions. We shared 4 potstickers up front that were fine, but ridiculously expensive at $17. Clay had beef brisket with tendon in a clay pot. Kind of disgusting and I didn’t taste it and he didn’t finish it. So… I had Mongolian beef and it was tasty and spicy but the meat was a little gristly. There was nothing we wanted for dessert. Clay had an Anchor Steam beer and I didn’t find anything reasonable on the wine list plus I was really tired so I just drank water. That meant we finished quickly and had over an hour to kill with no free seating available downstairs. Clay wanted to come back to the room, but he had already slept for hours and I knew if I got up here and on the bed I would be out for hours and miss the show. So, we just kept wandering. The casino in The Mirage is much busier than at the Bellagio.

We did wind up watching a couple of volcano shows after the partial view out our room window. We watched from the Strip sidewalk and felt the heat. We watched from the bottom of the exit driveway, so we got a long view without the heat. The only view we have missed is the one from right under the valet entrance at the front entrance. There isn’t much space there and people have been packed in there but it appears to be center stage viewing of the spectacle. It is a little ridiculous. I have yet to figure out what the theming is meant to be here. Is it Polynesian? That would be my best guess.

Looking for other things to do, it looks like Treasure Island has an outdoor show called Sirens, but it is closed through Dec. 20 or Christmas. So, we’ll miss that one.

The Beatles’ LOVE Cirque du Soleil show was incroyable! That’s French for incredible. I found it a bit disconcerting at first since the “stage” was divided in 4ths by see-through curtains that simulated mirrors of the divided space and the seating beyond. I am always disconcerted by what I see in mirrors anyway and knowing it wasn’t a mirror image didn’t help me process. I was really exhausted and cranky and the PD was really jerky and twitchy last night and we were in the seats 10 and 11 of a maybe 25 seat row, about 10 rows from the top and bottom. So, right in the middle. The section 200 wasn’t packed full but our row and immediate area were so I didn’t really have room to be that twitchy and kicky, but what are you going to do. I am sure the guy next to me was as unhappy as I was. Anyway, all that meant I didn’t enjoy it as much as I might have but I did still really enjoy it. It was beyond imagination. And some great, if ear shattering, Beatles’ songs. Loved it. It turns out that this and a couple of other of the Cirque theaters have speakers built into the seats and that is why the sound is so loud. We paid a base price of $104 plus $10.40 for a total of $114.40 each for tickets to this show.

We were in bed about midnight again, but have no plans for the morning other than finally sleeping in.

Photos