ANYWAY, I am going to attempt to ignore that and tell you about Vegas! Wild Animals! Spiritual Stuff! Irish Neighbors! And Helicopters! And other things that deserve exclamation points!!!!
First of all, about a week or so before Christmas we went to Vegas to visit my Uncle and Aunt J... dad's FAVORITE big brother. Padre is, like, OBSESSED with anything J does. It's like "Oh, you are into model trains now? OH, so am I!" Like he is 4. ANYWAY, so apparently there was some model train/plane/etc. thing that he wanted to go with John to and so we were all going under the Guise of Christmas, PLUS, of course Rinny and Dad wanted to see BYU play in the Vegas Bowl again like last year.
Only THIS time they decided the trip basically would BE the gifts... we were going to do a couple BIG SPLURGEY shows (we just didn't actually KNOW this, it was a surprise)... plus Rinny got the Vegas Bowl... so *I* could go back to the Secret Garden to see the tigers and dolphins and such (alone since nobody else much cared enough to make tickets worth it, but dang, I would LIVE there if I could!).
So, first we had to drive there. Listening to Talk Radio... and listening to my dad talk BACK to the talk radio... makes for a VERY VERY long trip. And for some reason, we didn't actually remember to BRING things to do. Or walkmans. But we had cameras. So, literally, we took pictures of ourselves the whole way.
SEE SLIDE-SHOW-O-RAMA!!! (you really should)
The scary thing is... WE DELETED THE MAJORITY of them. That's right. THESE are the GOOD ones.
Also, the trip was made much longer by the fact that 1. we were caught in a full-on white out blizzard in some mountain pass. 2. It was the worst (first?) snow storm in like 20 years in St. George (we actually stopped there for a bit to rest at the condo because the cars going off the road and we wanted to go to the temple in the morning!) and apparently in 30 years in Vegas. The snow in down south in St. George and Vegas was certainly not, like OUR bad weather, but for people not used to it... YEAH it was pretty big! And the flakes WERE enormous. Not flakes... like snow CLUMPS. It was hilarious.
When we finally got to The Orleans, we brought our picture frenzy into the gift shop...
and then the arcade, where I found this horrible and yet very fun game called Flamin Finger. It's awful! We just KEPT PLAYING! At least it gave us pretty good tickets.
We with our tickets bought some fuzzy dice to hang on our tree (hee hee!) and a yo-yo with Pacman on it. Then we split up. Nobody else wanted to spend the money to see the Secret Garden but as Dad was taking Rinny to the Las Vegas Bowl, *I* could go alone. They... actually, I am not sure what they did. I think my mom and went to the room with Rinny who took a nap and Dad gambled or went golfing. I could care less. I went to the Mirage. I took a few pics in front of the Beatles Lounge and then spent hours with dolphins, tigers, and lions.
Only problem? MY CAMERA DIED. Yeah, and it is one of those you charge in a charger, not the kind you can buy and replace batteries at the gift shop. I DID buy 2 highly-over-priced disposable cameras for more pics of the cubs, but you don't get to see those (yet.) So everything after that had to wait till I could borrow Rinny's camera. SIGH.
The secret garden was awesome (however, the info I gave about the litter of cubs isn't right. The Golden might be in Florida now, but there is only one golden and he IS male and his name is Svenghali and the other female was white with stripes. But they aren't with the mama. Anyway, I got it mixed up. But they are beautiful. As were the dolphin babies. SIGH! I could just LIVE there.
After a few hours there we went to dinner and because it was part of the super good deal with the hotel (that *I* found us online, thank you very much go me.) we got drinks. In our family it is always "just waters, thanks." but these were actual DRINK drinks. Like I ordered a REEEEALLY good Virgin Pina Colada. SO YUMMY. And Rinny had her VERY FIRST EVER MOCKTAIL! No, really. FIRST EVER. She is pretty firm on that "avoiding the appearance of evil" thing and she wasn't going to order one! She said they all sounded "yucky." I told her to go with a virgin Strawberry Daiquiri and that it was "basically a Zuka juice." She took a lot of coercing, but finally drank some. She didn't like it (and honestly, it wasn't the best mocktail ever... my Pina Colada was heaven but Rinn hates coconut!)
After dinner we saw Rinny's Dancing Waters some more (well, I had a migraine, so I actually just sat in the building being sick while Rinn did that) and we got ready for the night's big Splurge! Actually, I went back to the hotel and went into a little migraine coma until they woke me up and said "we are going now." Because I felt so super sick. Which was NOT awesome. But the SHOW was. TO BE CONTINUED.... AFTER you SEE all you can of what I just said! HA!
Which pretty much is all the explanation of AAAAAAAALL of these:
ENJOY! (and you can turn the music off up top of the little screen.)
