Christmas in Vegas

Matt and I are pretty much recovered from our trip to Vegas. We left on Christmas morning and met Art and Pam (Matt's parents) there for the week. We stayed at the MGM Grand hotel. Our rooms were awesome. We stayed in the newly renovated West Wing. All accommodations were super modern to include 2 flat screen TV's (one in the mirror in the bathroom), a BOSE soundwave radio, and a DVD player. The color scheme was monochromatic metal and black. Very nice. I don't think we ever managed to get any good pictures. We spent most of the trip just relaxing. The 4 of us went to see Dirk Arthur Xtreme Magic on Tuesday. That was cool. He uses big cats in his program and has a nature reserve outside the city where they live. Matt played in some Texas Hold Em' tournaments on Wed and Thurs mornings. I'll let him post about them. It's really the whole reason he wanted to go to Vegas. I see trips to the casino boats in Indiana in our near future. Thursday Art and Pam went on a trip to see Hoover Dam and Matt and I went to New York New York to play at the ESPN Zone. It's a glorified adult arcade. Matt and I enjoyed head to head racing and playing the hockey version of Foosball. Thursday night, we went back and had dinner at the same restaurant where we had our wedding reception, Grand Lux Cafe, in the Venetian. It was nice to take that trip down memory lane. I also spent a portion of Thursday figuring out how we were going to get home from Vegas. When I made the reservations in June, I didn't take into consideration the potential for bad weather in Denver (our connection city). We flew Frontier airlines, and they only connect in Denver. So, basically I had to get my Dad to find us a one way flight home on Southwest Airlines. SWA doesn't fly to Cincinnati though, so we arranged for mom to pick us up in Columbus. None of this really mattered in the end though. When we arrived in Nashville, our flight had been delayed over 2 hours. Apparently, Albuquerque had gotten a ton of snow and the plane we were waiting on was rerouted through Texas. Most flights out of Texas were grounded due to tornadic activity in the state. As they pushed our departure time back over and over again, Matt made the decision we were going to drive home. We went to the Avis counter and got the only car they had that needed to head one-way back North...a Lincoln Town Car. So, Matt and I were big pimpin back to Ohio in the wee hours of the morning.

It was a long adventure. We had a great trip, but as with all good vacations, it's nice to come home.