After being up at 5am for a 7am flight, we arrived after 7 hours of travel in Las Vegas at noon (time zones are so weird). We took some time to become human again (ie. a much needed shower), ate a super delicious home cooked meal, and headed out on the town. I never realized how ubiquitous gambling is in Vegas. That may seem like a stupid revelation, but I mean come on, WHY do you need a slot machine in the grocery store? In every gas station? They’re even at the airport, which is somewhat less surprising, but still.
Our first stop was to see the Welcome to Las Vegas sign, and pay our respects to the memorial for the recent shooting.
The memorial was incredibly humbling. Seeing the names and faces of all of the innocent victims of a senseless murder spree, the majority of whom weren’t even native to Las Vegas, hit home with a lot of the people visiting, especially when seeing mourning family members placing flowers on the crosses.
After that uplifting trip, we headed to the Bellagio to see their gardens.
The gardens were incredible! I can’t imagine how much work they put into building and upkeeping the displays. Next, we went outside to the fountains in the front to watch the show, synced with classical music.
We went on our way, heading downtown to explore the nightlife there. We entered a casino, where my family enjoyed playing the poker machines, and I lost $5 to a slot machine. I really don’t understand the appeal of gambling; I work very hard for my money, and don’t want to just feed it to a hungry machine! I’d much rather have something to show for it….so, naturally, my grandmother and I went to a little souvenir shop across the way and spent our hard-earned money on candy 😀 We spent a good deal of time hanging out in that casino, but the omnipresent smoke was really starting to get to all of us, and we took our leave and headed back. Finally, after being awake for ~21 hours, we passed out in our beds.
ADK Trail Tales and Tails 
Great travelogue — thoroughly enjoyed it (and agree with your take of the G. Canyon). Since you can’t get me out of the ’daks any more with a water cannon, I would never have been able to see many of those sights in person.
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Thank you so much, I’m glad you enjoyed it. I am still determined to get back to the Grand Canyon to climb it, so look forward to that post in the years to come 🙂
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Great post, thank you for sharing! I can agree with your feeling of finding the GC underwhelming. I think part of the problem is that it is just SO big that its hard to really take it in. I have hiked the Bright Angel trail also and it didn’t leave me feeling any different. Its a beautiful place of course but placing like Zion and Bryce are way more inspiring in my personal opinion. If you make it back out to hike in the GC I would recommend planning to go down to the river and back out to really make for a unique experience.
Also just a side note, you may want to consider splitting up large posts like this into smaller ones so they load easier for people, especially on mobile devices.
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Thanks for the insight! I’ll have to do that the next time I’m out there. I hadn’t realized that big posts are hard to load on mobile devices, I’ll try to break them up in the future 🙂
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