New Years Eve was definitely a once-in-a-lifetime experience for Russ and I. We decided that we would hit the road with Rok and Narine and head to Vegas to celebrate 2010. I know what you're thinking... Vegas for New Years? Isn't that a little extreme to go to "sin city" when you don't drink? We'll there is A LOT to do in Vegas that doesn't all have to do with drinking and gambling and all that.... and we did it.
We took off early New Years Eve day after I went into work for a few hours to process the payroll. The ride there was smooth with no traffic and we ended up getting into vegas around 2pm. We met up with Russ and Leslie Day (One of Russ' best friends from high school, who is as general manager at a local hotel in Vegas and hooked us up with some rooms--thanks again Day!) and we hit up some Mexican food for lunch. Then Narine and I dropped off the boys at the hotel room who wanted to take naps before our night out and we went shopping at TJ Max to see if we could find any last minute fun things to wear for the evening. I ended up getting my whole outfit, dress, leggings, belt, etc. Narine ended up getting a really cute skirt that she also wore. By The way, I love TJ Max. :)
We got back just in time to get ready and head out to our reservations at the Rain Forest Cafe in the MGM Grand. Here are some pictures of us there.
They boys were besides themselves when they found these awesome snow tiger t-shirts. They wanted to buy them and be twinsies.
After dinner we headed out to the strip. It was JAMMED PACKED with people, as you can imagine. We ended up finding this perfect spot right in the middle of all of the action so we could see the firework shows once it hit midnight.
Narine and I had several drunk girls come up to us asking us where we found our cute new years hats and if they could buy them off of us.... we should have sold them for $100 each--I'm sure one of them was drunk enough that they would have paid it. :) But in the spirit of New Years, we wanted our hats on to celebrate!
So when the countdown completed we all celebrated! We had a perfect spot and were able to see about four of the firework shows that lined the strip. My favorite part was watching the show right behind the mini Eiffel Tower. It was stunning. Vegas definitely goes all out at New Years. The grand finales for each of the firework shows were awesome.
The hard part was getting back to the MGM Grand where we had parked our cars. We couldn't believe how insane it was. It was so insane that some guy even came up and groped me. I know!!!!! Can you believe it!!! I was so mad about it and felt so violated. Unfortunately it was so crowded that I didn't even have time to get Russ' attention to beat the heck out of him... and by the time I told Russ what happened, the guy had moved back into the sea of people all around us. The insane part was that people had brought their babies and children to the strip! I don't think any of them realized the situation they would be in--and many had to lift the strollers above their heads to keep their kids from getting trampled. Leslie, Narine and I keep mumbling what bad parents these people were... not only was it freezing out, but what the heck were they thinking?
After pushing and pretty much crowd surfing... we got back to the MGM grand and waited a while before we decided to brave the parking garage. By this time we had the 2am munchies and decided to go to Ihop for some New Year's breakfast. I don't know what we were thinking... but by the time we had stuffed ourselves full of chocolate chip pancakes we remembered that the boys had tee-time set for 11am the next morning, so we decided that we better get off to bed.
Here is Narine, Leslie, and I right before we headed to the parking garage. We wanted to show off our hats and cute outfits one last time.
So the next day the boys headed out to golf at one of the local courses and the girls decided to go shopping at the outlet mall. I wanted to switch out my Coach purse that I had gotten as a Christmas present and get some good deals... so off we went. We had a fabulous time and the outlet was having a huge after-Christmas sale, so we were able to get AMAZING deals! The three of us shopped away until about 5pm. The boys also had fun golfing--they did 18 holes so they didn't finish until about 4:30pm and they came back with smiles on their faces about their scores.
Russ and Leslie already had plans for the night, so we said goodbye and Rok Narie and we decided to get ready for another night out on the strip. We decided we would try to get tickets to one of the shows so we hurried up and got ready to go down town to see what tickets we could get. Unfortunately we were too late for all of the shows that started at 7pm, so we decided to go to this hypnosis comedy show. We didn't realize that in the title it said hypnosis "unrated" which in Vegas -- you never know what you are going to get... and it ended up that the comedian was this really sleazy gross guy. Definitely a waste of money, but whatever. I guess that's the Vegas experience.
The next morning we decided to go to the pawn shop where Pawn Stars is filmed. I'm not sure if you've ever seen the show... but it's pretty interesting. My in-laws love it... so we thought it would be really cool to go and check it out. Unfortunately there were like 50 people waiting in line to go in--about a 45 minute wait, so we decided it wasn't worth the wait, but we did take a whole bunch of pictures out side of the place.
Russ wanted this motorcycle that was like 5 grand... but I was like "No Way, Jose!"
Then to finish up our Vegas trip in style we headed over to the Treasure Island Buffet. Where we decided it would be fun to try to sneak out a whole bunch of chocolate strawberries for our trip ride back.... but Russ decided to tattle on Narine and I with our waitress and she ended up giving us the WORST looks! Russ ended up filming us trying to get our strawberries out... maybe I'll get him to post the video.... it was pretty funny. Leslie was the hero when she went and found some plastic cups that we just put the strawberries in and put the lid on top and put in our purses. :) I know.... the Las Vegas spirit was getting to us and we probably shouldn't have snuck out the 8 chocolate strawberries that we did, but hey would have stayed longer to eat them (I know... I'm justifying).
Check out the strawberries in Leslie's bowl...
After Treasure Island we attempted to hit the road only to find completely stopped traffic! So after checking the traffic report and our maps, we decided to go to Henderson and watch a couple of movies while we waited for the traffic to clear. We ended up seeing two movies--- Up In the Air and Sherlock Holmes. It was a perfect ending to our fun Vegas trip.
