Well, I'm back from vegas, and about the only way I can sum up the place is "Insanity".  The travel to vegas was probably the worst in my life. 26 hours of travel for 4 days of entertainment.  Basically the way there, I rode a shuttle bus down to marquette, taxi from the bus station to the airport, then sat outside the airport in the freezing cold for 2.5 hours because it was closed, I didn't even have a jacket, that was a good time, then fly from marquette to green bay to chicago, then to las vegas.  When I got to vegas everything seemed really dirty and gimmicky.  We couldn't even check into our hotel because it wasn't even ready, so basically I just sat there while my grandpa gambled. I'm not big into gambling at all so I found it to be very boring at first. We finally got to check into our hotel and met up with my cousin tom, whom's wedding I went out there for.  He was staying at Caesar's Palace which was just ridiculously nice. We ended up hanging out there and checking it out, then went out to dinner at this place called "The Cheesecake factory", it was pretty good, then we went out after and went drinking and I got to meet my cousin tom's friends, I was getting pretty tired, I was up for like 31 hours straight at this point (with only 2 hours of sleep the day before) and went and had some good bonding with my dad, just drinking and talking a lot about life.

The next day my grandpa wakes me up at like 8am, so I got like 5 hours of sleep again and wanted to take me out to breakfast. We went out, then decided to check out the town and various casinos. All the places are pretty insane, at least from the outside, but then you go inside and every casino pretty much looks the same.  That afternoon I went golfing with my cousin tom and all his buddies, the golf course was pretty nice too. That night was my cousin toms bacehlor party, we went to this brazilian steak house restaurant, they bring out a bunch of different types of meat on scures (sp?) and you take slices or pieces of it. It was probably some of the best meat I have ever had. Then after we all rode a stretch limo hummer downtown and checked that out, got to see that big screen on the ceiling and a lot of other stuff.  That night I was super tired, only made it up till like 2am.

I crashed out till about 9am, and again my grandpa got me up to eat buffet.  The buffet's out there are ridiculous, pretty much anything you can imagine are on them, and actually not that expensive like $11.  Everything else on the other hand is expensive as shit, I was paying like $9 a beer out there.  That day we checked out some more of the strip, and just hung out by the pool (I was staying at the Imperial Palace).  Then that night we had the rehersal dinner at some Italian restaurant, then went to this dueling piano bar after. It was pretty cool there, people were just drunk and stupid. This old lady (probably like 90+ years) and was dancing. After that we went to this club that my cousin knew someone so we got on the list, because you can't get in unless your on the list.  It was called Tao, you can check out the myspace page here, it shows all the celebrities that go there.  It was basically a really high status club, the place was the most insane club I have ever been to, it was seriously like something out of a movie. There were chicks practically naked making out in tubs, dancing up on the walls, fireworks going off, and probably like 2,000 people there. I wonder if I'll even ever end up at a club like that again, I was pretty much just in awe the whole time.  Again drinks were ridiculously priced and you had to wait like 20 minutes just to get one. You can check out some of the pics I took of it.

The next day was the last day I was there, got up and went over to the pool at the venetian hotel. That place is modeled after Italy and I thought was the nicest place out there. My aunt was staying there so we got into the pool.  So I hung out there all day, then went to my cousin's wedding which was at Caesar's palace. The wedding was really nice and probably the fanciest wedding I have ever been too. The reception was there as well, with a full open bar, so you can imagine I was probably a little tipsy.  The reception ended at 10 and we ended up going back to the piano bar.  The girls that were at the wedding party kept wanting me to hang out, but I told them I wanted to talk to my aunt since I hadn't seen her in like 3 years and we were discussing me coming out to visit her again in San Francisco this summer. Well they ended up just coming up and basically started giving me a lap dance, and the piano guy told us to come up on stage, he started playing some type of club/dance music on the piano I was basically freaking on these 2 girls at once in front of like 500 people, including my family, hahah, but everyone thought it was pretty funny and I figured, whatever I was in vegas and it was my last night there. So we hung out there for a while, didn't get home till like 3am, then had to get up at 5am to get ready for my flight out. Flew from vegas to dallas to chicago to green bay to marquette, then had to drive home.

So that's about sums up my trip. It was definitiely insane. Vegas is basically Disney world for adults. I don't know how often I will be going back there, when I first got there I didn't like it at all, but towards the end had a really good time.  If you plan on going, plan to spend a LOT of money. I can see now why people only go for like 3 or 4 days at a time. I recommend that everyone visits the place once in your life just for the experience, but personally I think I would rather take a trip hiking somewhere, it would probably cost you 1/3 as much and you could spend 3 times as long doing it. Now that I'm back in houghton, it's funny because everything seems like its in slow motion, out there things just go for 24 hours a day. But overall it was a really good time, got some good father/son bonding in with my dad, and got to hang out with a lot of my family I don't get to see often.



you can see all my pictures from vegas here