Las Vegas (Las Vegas)

Member Name: reetpetite61

Product:	Las Vegas
Date:	03/09/09 (70 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Loads of fun for everyone

Disadvantages: Very hot and lots of walking

My partner and I have just returned from our first trip to Vegas. Wow! Over the top, glitzy, and truly wonderful.
Three nights at the start of a flydrive holiday and two nights at the end.

If you can't take the heat, don't go in the summer. We went in August and I found it pretty uncomfortable. Having said that, you are free to walk in and out of any of the hotels to take advantage of the air conditioning. I found that thirty minutes at a time was enough and I still managed to get a tan.

We stayed at the Excalibur Hotel for the first three nights which is at the south end of the strip and has free parking. This Hotel is also known as The Castle and looks exactly like a fairy castle from a Disney Movie. The room was comfortable with two Queen sized beds a nice bathroom with a large shower but unlike the Hotels on the rest of our trip you don't get any tea or coffee making facilities in any of the rooms in Vegas and I must have my coffee in the morning. There was a little place downstairs that sold coffee and pastries but I found this very expensive. They don't want you in your rooms when there is gambling to be done. It also sports six restaurants. The Hotel also has a spa and fitness centre and four swimming pools with a jaccuzi. The widescreen rooms have 42" plasma tv's. There are 3,991 rooms plus two towers with twenty eight floors in each tower.
Also there is a show called Tournament of kings if you buy a ticket for this show dinner is included. We didn't see it because there wasn't enough time. I think you need two weeks to see and do everything in Vegas and then some. When my grandkids saw my photos they couldn't believe I stayed in a fairy castle!
The Excalibur is a nice Hotel despite its bizarre look from the outside, and there is a moving walkway that takes you straight into the Luxor, or you can use the free monorail which takes you to the Luxor and the Mandalay Bay hotels.

Although the Excalibur is quite noisy and very busy we found it to be a very pleasant place to stay because it is on the strip where everything happens and we did enjoy having a little flutter on the slots. The downside for us was that we didn't realise that all drinks are free as long as you are gambling; we only found this out when we got home.

We went to the Mirage Hotel where we found Siegfried & Roy's secret garden and Dolphin habitat.
The Dolphin habitat has a main pool where you can sit round and watch the Dolphins perform at close range.The keepers also tell you about the birthing researching pool.
They also have Lions and Tigers right there in the Hotel grounds. At the front of the Mirage they have an erupting volcano which appears to have lava and flames spewing from it. This erupts every few minutes.

During these three days we went to the Stratosphere which is right at the North end of the Strip. The tower, which has a revolving restaurant, is the highest building west of the Mississippi river and right on the top are three pretty scary rides that take you out away from the building and you find yourself suspended over the city.These rides are quite expensive but well worth it for the adrenalin rush but if you book a table for a meal you get into the tower free.
The food was very good but personally I think a little over priced, we had lunch there and spent about sixty dollars plus the tip.

To get to this northern end of the strip you can use the monorail, which runs from the back of the MGM Grand all the way up to Sahara, with several stops in between. You can get a single ride ticket for $5, a 24-hour ticket costs $15, or a 10-ride ticket costs $35.
The downside of the monorail is that whichever Hotel to travel to it drops you at the back of the Hotel and it can take you a good half an hour to get back to The Strip.

Something else we learned quite quickly was that you don't pay $4 dollars a bottle for water ( it's essential that you have a bottle with you when you go out during the day ) there are street vendors on all of the walkways selling water for $1 and its ice cold, they may be illegal vendors but I know which I would rather pay.

The Luxor Hotel is where we stayed on our return to Vegas for our last two nights, this is also located at the south end of the strip between the Excalibur and the Mandalay Bay, we stayed in the pyramid but there are also two enormous towers as well which we could have upgraded to but we decided it would be nicer in the pyramid . The Luxor has an Egyptian theme there is a huge statue of the sphinx at the front of the hotel and inside the entrance there are more huge statues. The inside is also done in the same theme. Registration was a bit of an ordeal, the queues were extremely long but I must say there were lots of desks open and they dealt with everyone fairly quickly.
We were a bit disappointed with the room however. The iron had a dodgy lead that you had to move about to make the iron stay on, the sink plug had black gunge all over it, and at least one of the electrical sockets seemed to be hanging off the wall, apart from those minor issues it was comfortable enough.
On our penultimate night we had tickets for the Caesar's Palace Colosseum to see Bette Midler we bought the tickets in the UK, very expensive but well worth it. She was amazing.
The last night we walked back up to the Bellagio Hotel to see the fountains. This show of water dancing to music cannot be missed. They start at 3 pm Mon-Fri, or noon at weekends, and are shown every 30 minutes until 8pm. It then changes to every 15 minutes until midnight it was one of the highlights of my stay in Vegas.

Las Vegas may be glitzy and way over the top but there is so much more to it than just gambling, lots to see and do for everybody.

Summary: Glitzy, over the top but fantastic