Las Vegas '08 Part 1

Since I took a bunch of pictures in Vegas this weekend, I thought I'd break the report up into several posts and include as many pictures as I can along with the story. We left home at 6:30 am on Saturday and arrived at the Las Vegas Hilton at 10:30 - a piece of cake drive after all the trips to Northern California I've made in the last year. The Hilton was our stop for Saturday night, and thanks to the monorail system which stops right outside the front door, it's pretty easy to get anywhere you want on the Strip without having to drive.

One warning about the monorail - most of the stations along the Strip are located about 1/4 mile from Las Vegas Blvd, which means you will have a lengthy walk through a hotel/casino just to get out to the Blvd, and if you want to visit locations on the west side of the Blvd, the walk gets even longer. For instance, if you want to take the monorail to visit the Forum Shops at Caeser's, you have to exit at Harrahs, walk all the way through the casino to the Blvd, walk several hundred feet to the crossing, cross the Blvd, and then walk a ways further just to get inside the door. Given the size of the Forum Shops, you can plan to walk a lot further to see the whole place.

On the plus side, the monorails run each direction about every five minutes, they're clean and pretty comfortable, and not a bad way to go.

During our brief 48 hours in town we used the monrail 4 times and managed to visit all of the following casino/hotels: Las Vegas HiltonBally's, Paris Las Vegas, Planet Hollywood, MGM Grand, New York New York, Excalibur, Luxor, Mandalay Bay, Bellagio, Caeser's Palace, Treasure Island, The Venetian, The Palazzo and Wynn Las Vegas. We walked a lot.

Lunch on Saturday was at my wife's favorite place - the little pastry and sandwich shop in Paris Las Vegas.
Leaving Paris we walked south down Las Vegas Blvd. to M&Ms World (shown in a previous post). Along the way we marveled at the huge construction project that's going on in what used to be a large open parking area between the Monte Carlo and Bellagio. They're going to put in a new casino/hotel along with thousands of residential units. I can't even imagine what the traffic on Las Vegas Blvd. will be like when this thing opens.

Dinner was at Planet Hollywood, which used to be The Aladdin. They've really wrecked that place. The shopping mall was called the "Desert Passage Shop", but now it looks like this:

It's the same junk you can see on any corner in L.A. They haven't quite finished ruining the inside yet. While walking around the main loop where the shops are, you go from this, a Moroccan bazaar:
to this, Hollywood bizarre:
Those two sections were within just a few feet of each other, and you can see as you walk around that they have plans to take all the charm completely out of the place.

More in part 2.