Monday 9 August 2010:
Las Vegas is overwhelming, exciting, intense, insane, colourful, absurd, over-the-top,........the list goes on!! Oh and hot, very very hot!
There is something for everyone in this desert city. Excaliber hotel and casino has a massive roller coaster, Mandalay Bay hotel and casino has an aquarium, and MGM Grand has a lion enclosure in the middle. The Bellagio has a gigantic fountain outside that puts on a show every 15 minutes to the rhythm of classic songs, and inside they have a fairy garden set up with enormous plants and little hot air balloons dotting the ceiling. In the Venetian you can window shop floating on a gondola along a canal inside the hotel. And of course at any of these you can let the gambling world entice you. We only played a few dollars in the slot machines. At MGM Grand I at least turned my $1 into $11 but then proceeded to lose it all again at the other casinos.The hotels are also strategically designed because you have to walk through the casinos to get to the shops or the restaurants.

We also visited M&Ms world.The store has four floors and all things M&M.There are columns full of different colours of M&Ms. The aircon in the store was heavenly though. Outside the heat radiates off the buildings and pavement.At the Hawaiian Markets and a few other random places they have fans blowing cold mist into the crowds.The mist evaporates pretty quickly though.

In Vegas alcohol is available everywhere and it is legal to walk around the city with a cocktail in hand.The frozen cocktails were a winner (cover picture).You can get free drinks at the casinos when you gamble but we were never stayed anywhere long enough to get any.There are also a lot of people handing out flyers and cards advertising strip clubs or the like.After the first 100m we got pretty good at ignoring them.

It is easy to lose track of time in Vegas. We stayed at Harrah's and got back to our room well after midnight every night. Vegas truly never sleeps!I fully loved every minute there.The vibrancy and anticipation of the place is infectious!