Vacation: Getting There

Ahhh we are home from our "vacation!"

A vacation to Vegas, to Utah, to RUN, back to Vegas and finally home. If I was a good blogger I'd have left some scheduled posts but I was so stinking busy I didn't even have time for that.

So! Thursday I went to work and then came home and packed and then we were off to Vegas!

We flew out of Stockton like we have always done to go to Vegas. The airport is like 15 minutes away. They have really cheap flights, well they USED to be cheap, but now they find ways to nickle and dime you to death so that they are now not really any cheaper than flying on a larger airline.

For example, if you want to "pick your seats" to guarantee that you will sit with your spouse or whoever, you have to pay $12 or so a seat each way. In the past I never did that and they would still seat us together but not on this trip. Luggage is super expensive and has a 40 pound weight limit. We took one bag. You have to pay for carry-ons now and parking, which also used to be free.  I think if we go again we might take a different airline just so that we can take more luggage without having to pay an arm and a leg. Oh and sit together.

Anyhow, we got to the airport and then had a bite to eat at the airport cafe. YUM!

Way too much food. It's a good thing we ate though. Our one hour flight got us to Vegas super quick but then it took about 2 hours to get from the airport to our hotel. 

We had booked the shuttle through the airline to get to the hotel and it took FOREVER. Our flight landed around 10:30 and we got to our hotel at 12:30 am. One hour of standing around waiting and then about another hour of driving around dropping off a bunch of people. 

We were the last ones to get dropped off. I will not do that again. Next time we will just pay for a cab. Some things are just worth paying a little extra money for. Like your sanity.

We stayed in the old part of Vegas at The Plaza. I was really hoping we were still going to have a room since it was so late when we got there. No worries. We went up to our room which was facing the Fremont party area (the hotel clerk asked us if it was ok with the live bands playing and stuff and we said yes) and this was our view

 Kind of fun! We relaxed for few minutes and then went down and walked up and down the strip area. We had missed the "party time" a little bit and everyone was pretty smashed looking. It probably would have been a ton of fun to be down there when it was earlier and all the bands were playing and stuff. When we were walking around it was a little bit depressing seeing the bums and beggars and drunk people.

We didn't really see anywhere we wanted to stop to hang out. Then Scott spotted a Dunkin Donuts in the back of a casino so we got a donut lol.

We saw the restaurant where if you weight 350 pounds you can eat for free (gross!)

This Elvis suit caught Scott's eye so we had to stop and take a picture for my friend who just loves Elvis.

We decided we'd just go back to the hotel and have some drinks in the casino. We played some slots and never saw a cocktail waitress. There was a bar but it didn't appear to be open. When we were so thirsty we decided to go to the room we passed an 80 so year old cocktail waitress in her stretchy gold sparkle cocktail dress. Oh man! That's just sad.

So we ended our first night in Vegas totally sober! That's a first haha.  I snapped a couple pictures of our room but it was kind of dark but you get the idea.

The only bad thing about the room was how loud I could hear the next door neighbor's TV in our room. Luck for me I was pretty exhausted by the time we actually went to bed so I was able to fall asleep. I'm so not a "white noise" type of person.

 Not too shabby for an old hotel! I'd totally stay here again. Maybe just ask for a room up a little higher so we could see the strip a little better.