Thursday started out with me almost missing my shuttle to the airport. I went to bed about 1am and needed to be up by at least 4am as the shuttle was picking me up at 4:30am. Silly me didn’t use an alarm clock. But around 4:25am I jumped up and yelled a couple expletive words. Luckily the shuttle was a little late and I managed to pull everything together in 10 minutes. Once at the airport, things went smoothly. The United, really Ted flight was on time and we arrived in Las Vegas to hot, hot weather!
In that I was tired and knew that my day/night would be long, I decided to take a nap. But no go, maybe it was because the room at the Venetian hotel was so beautiful, or better yet the excitement of being in Las Vegas, but couldn’t sleep. So met up with a fellow Michigan alum, who promised to show me the town.
We started off with lunch at Rincon Criollo Cuban Restaurant. It was the sort of place that wouldn’t be written up in any of the Vegas guides, as it was in the old part of Vegas and more the sort of place that locals would frequent. In any event, the food was really delicious and can’t wait to have Cuban food again.
After lunch, I convinced my friend to check out the Liberace Museum. I’d been there once many years ago with Best Guy Friend, but wanted to check it out again. Just as I had remembered, everything was over the top. The cars, the pianos, the jewelry and most definitely the clothing. The average costume in the collection laden with rhinestones, feathers and/or fur was about 65lbs with one coming close to 300lbs. Can you imagine wearing clothing that heavy? Yikes! And to think he did that every night he was on the stage.
After Liberace Museum, we went over to the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino to check out Shark Reef. While there, we were able to see some of the 1200 different species of aquatic life including various exotic fish, sea turtles and sharks. They even had a hammerhead shark which is supposedly pretty rare in aquarium type museums. Oh yeah, they even had a pond where we could touch baby sharks and sting rays. I’m not sure when the facility was built but thinking it’s a throw back to when Vegas was trying to attract more families.
Once we finished up at Mandalay Bay, we headed over to the Bellagio Hotel & Casino to check out the Conservatory & Botanical Gardens. We had also planned to stop in at the Monet exhibit, but in that time was running out, we sat around and just enjoyed the beautiful scenery.
After my friend dropped me off, I decided to try and take a nap again. But no go. I made the mistake of turning on the TV and got sucked into watching the coverage of President Reagan’s body being transported to the Capitol Building.
Realizing that I was going on limited sleep and the work day was just beginning, I took another shower before heading down to company meeting which lasted until about 10pm. At one point in meeting, I thought I would keel over as I was so tired. And in that all of my teammates wanted to go out after, I decided to go overboard with the dessert tray. That seemed to perk me up and so I was more agreeable with going out.
Originally, we were suppose to head to the Palms Casino Hotel but in that we couldn’t get our act together, around 11pm, we ended up at the Venus Nightclub inside the Venetian Hotel. While there I drank way too much while watching my coworkers make fools of themselves on the dance floor. Ok, maybe I was making a fool of myself too. Around 1:30am, we decided to move on to Denny’s (yes Denny’s) as someone in the group was hungry. While there we were trying to figure out what to do next, but something told me to graciously make my exit and go to bed which is what I did around 2am. The next morning I would learn that they ended up at a strip club and things got so raunchy that the story of what exactly happened should be left in Vegas.