Viva Las Vegas

We survived the night! No Robert Blake hiding under the bed or in the bathroom or lurking in the carpark. After a shower under a huge skylight, we saddled up and rode off to Las Vegas. We knew we were almost there quite some time before actually arriving, as after going round a bend in the desert road, the city pops up out of nowhere. It's pretty identifiable, given there is a pyramid amongst all the buildings. And to the Luxor we were headed.  

It is hard to describe the Luxor hotel - it was as huge, busy and tacky as I had expected, but the enormous line to check in and the phenomenal number of rooms made it feel a little like we were just a room number. Still, the interior statues and gigantic sphinx out the front made it a place the likes of which I have never seen before. 

We had dinner at Paymons Mediterranean Cafe & Lounge, which served up huge platters of vegan falafel, tabouli, baba ganoush, hummus, dolmades and pita bread. I also had a few Babylon Spice cocktails - coconut milk, mango juice and ginger infused rum. They knocked my socks off, so after a quick spin down The Strip, T went in search of some more cocktails within the hotel so we could both enjoy them without him having to drive. He located them at The Mandalay Bay hotel next door and brought them back to our room:

Yowzers! 1.5 litres of strawberry daquiri and fruit punch each. And punch they did!

The next day we decided to take a trip out to the Hoover Dam near the border of Nevada and Arizona. We ate at the Red Velvet Cafe the way out of town and were at the dam within the hour. The highlight for me was a government sanctioned sculpture of two winged figures, complete with a scale map of the planets and stars, to assist aliens in finding their way when they finally make it to earth: 

 

Dinner was at Long Life Veg, which was a Chinese restaurant serving mock meat dishes. I tried the sesame "chicken", and T gave the "beef" stir fry a go. It was pretty good, but marred a little by the fact that we had to wait a long time for our order to be taken. A family that came in left due to this delay (and we had been close to leaving also). 

And then came the true gamble - T and I went on the rollercoaster at the New York New York hotel. This hotel consists of a number of replicas of iconic New York buildings, which the roller coaster twists its' way around. It was T's first time on a rollercoaster, and while he was a little apprehensive, he came through it like a trooper. It was an intense ride with multiple loops, corkscrews and other concerning arrangements. And with that we bid goodnight to Las Vegas.