WestCoast 8 : Las Vegas, Luxor and Helicopters
All I can say about Las Vegas is that I was ill-prepared for it. You’ll have to go there for yourself.
Nevada is quite crazy anyway, with loads of slot machines at the gas stations and local laundromats…
In Las Vegas, we stayed at the fourth-largest hotel in the world located on the strip : the Luxor. It has a Sfynx (larger than the original…) built in front of the hotel-casino complex just for decoration. That right there is Las Vegas for you. The hotel-casino complex itself is built in the shape of a huge Pyramid. The Pyramid is ‘hollow” from the inside while the hotelrooms are built on the sides of the upstanding walls of the pyramid. So inside, you have this enormous open space, with the casino in the middle.
Our hotel is very very easy to find as on top of the Pyramid there is a GI-GAN-TIC beam of light in the sky - the world’s most powerful lightsource of 315.000 watts. Amazing. And the hotel staff even ‘dares’ to put a card in your room saying that they care tremendously for the environment and request that you take some action to help them with that (like reusing towels etc.).
Confused already? Check out the pictures…
Sanne and I gambled… Sanne lost on the slots but I could make it up with blackjack :D. We have a great picture of Sanne standing next to a slot machine saying ‘bar-bar-bar’. $3.75 in profit for Sanne ;-).
Sanne and I also went on a helicopter flight of the Grand Canyon - in hindsight a great choice. I had quite some problems sleeping the evening before… but found out at the helicopter-companies’ headquarters that there was a couple far more terrified than I was ;-). Unfortunately you’ll have to believe us since the memory-stick of our camera broke down, but the trip yielded truly amazing views of Lake Mead, the Hoover Dam, the Grand Canyon and the Bowl of Fire (some area with different and deeply colored brick). Sanne even saw wild horses walking around. It was still quite scary on our trip to the Grand Canyon. Our helicopter flew THROUGH the Grand Canyon under the rim itself and even landed on a spot near the west rim. We had a glass of champagne and some light snacks there and enjoyed the great views for some 45 minutes. Afterwards we flew back - and I found myself more accustomed to helicopter flights already.
If you go to Las Vegas - don’t spare the money, just do it. We flew with Maverick in their most modern helicopters - highly recommended.