Somehow the fireworks evaded us on 4th July. We stood outside Caesar's Palace with what felt like the rest of the Vegas for over an hour and absolutely sod all happened, even though everyone expected a display at 9pm. We settled for cocktails and ridiculously cheap bowling instead ($1 a game as it was the graveyard shift, after midnight).

The next day we travelled to the famous 'Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas' sign and Jak rode the rollercoaster at the New York-New York hotel; it goes through the hotel and loops the loop over the strip. He almost lost a second pair of glasses but remembered to take them off just before the ride started...

However, the best part of the day was watching the Bellagio Fountain - there are different shows with water, lights and music every 30 minutes during the day and every 15 minutes at night. It is not exaggerating to say that the shows are beautiful. One woman was hugging the speakers and crying during a performance set to Celine Dion, which is a little weird but gives you an idea of how good they are. We'd caught glimpses of the shows from across the road before but we hadn't actually stood and watched one from beginning to end.

Yesterday we started a 7 day bus tour (not a day too soon - we are both now officially addicted to the poker slot machines in Vegas) that's going to take us to a number of places including Mount Rushmore and Yellowstone National Park. One passenger has already, rather unnecessarily, pointed out to us that we are the only white people on the tour; every single other passenger is Chinese. So far this doesn't seem to be a problem whatsoever as the tour guide is being very good at saying everything in English as well as Mandarin and everyone is very friendly and keeps asking where we're from. Plus there's no chance we'll get left behind as we stick out like a sore thumb!

We stayed in Richfield, Utah last night. I can't tell you much about the place as we pulled in at 10.30pm and left at 6.30am *shudder*, apart from the fact that the shower produced dead flies as well as water and the huge air conditioning unit in our room looked like a dalek and sounded like a dying horse so we got hardly any sleep. On the plus side they supplied a yummy continental breakfast.

Today we dropped by Arches National Park, which looks like something out of an old Western film. We got out at a few places to take pictures and hiked up to one of the huge arches that looked amazing, like it framed a piece of the sky. We wouldn't have thought to visit the park if it hadn't been included on the tour but it was surprisingly good.