Day Thirteen - Thursday, May 14, 2009

Today's agenda was full - touring the Strip south of our hotel in the morning, lunch, laundry, updating the blog, and touring the Strip north of our hotel and dinner in the evening. Here's how much of that we got done.

What a great morning! Hot - really hot - but great! We walked south on Las Vegas Blvd. past Bally's, the Imperial Palace, Paris, Planet Hollywood, and MGM. There were other casinos and shops and CVS and Walgreen's (just had to mention those last two!), but we just wandered by and looked at the amazing efforts to attract us to the venues. Paris' Eiffel Tower and MGM's lion were the best, although I also really liked the huge Coca-Cola bottle along the way. We crossed over to New York New York and wandered into the casino because we really were hot and we needed some air conditioning. While there we got a phone call from Jennifer announcing that she had filed her dissertation and had the paperwork designating that she is a Ph. D. now! What a great phone call that was. Hurray and congratulations again, Jennifer.

We found lovely Chinese restaurant called Chin Chin for lunch inside New York New York. The food and service and price all were terrific. Of course we had so much food leftover that we decided we had dinner from the leftovers. We went directly back to the hotel to get the food into the refrigerator. Then we got the laundry started - four loads in a very small apartment type stacked washer-dryer unit. And we started blogging. We got one day done and several sets of photos posted. The next day (Day 11) posted in a partially saved version and then the Internet connection went down. After two more failed attempts to get the post completed, the Internet just wouldn't cooperate so I quit!

Frustrating.

Eventually the laundry was done. It was bourbon time. It was dinner time. It was TV time: season ending episodes of Bones and CSI kept us entertained as we organized our stuff for an early departure the next morning. It's out with Vegas and in with Death Valley. Now there's a contrast. You really have to like diversity to travel with the Bussell's! And once again we found ourselves saying that we will have to come back to Las Vegas to see more another time.