"Sin City, Baby." a Las Vegas Travel Page by emilienoelle

Vegas was one of those places that I had always kept in the back of mind as someplace that I'd like to see "someday", but I was in no real rush to actually do it until my husband had to go there on business. When he called me after he checked into his hotel the first night I was JEALOUS! I wanted to see the big lights and fancy hotels and showgirls and rich Japanese men playing poker all night. ME! ME! ME!

So, two summers ago when we had a trip to Iceland fall through on us (a very upsetting thing) we decided that we would take the money and go to Vegas instead. On very short notice it is the perfect vacation place.

My dissapointment over Iceland was quickly soothed when we checked into the Bellagio. We had a great experience there and loved visiting the hotels up and down the strip. While exploring we invented a "drinking game" of sorts where we went to each hotel and ordered one drink from the bar so that we could get a book of matches for our collection. (We have them from everywhere we've traveled to; they're fun to look through on cold winter days.) On the first day of this "game" we made it to about 5 places and had to call a cab to take us back to our hotel! But, all in all, over the length of our stay we managed to gather about 30 matchbooks! Quite an accomplishment.

We are not the gambling type. We don't play the lottery and we are both miserably bad at anything involving numbers--I mean you should see our checkbook. So "game" number 2 while in Las Vegas and drinking too much was playing the slots with our change from buying drinks. We were only allowed to use the change. Nothing else. Oddly, I think we broke even by the end of the week, having just as many quarters and nickels weighing us down at the airport metal detectors as when we had arrived!