Vegas - Summer 2014

I took Kyle to Vegas for his first time.  We stayed at the newly-renovated, very white Tropicana for free with my Hilton points.  It conveniently was hosting the Mama Mia show, which we thoroughly enjoyed. 

We visited as many hotels as I could drag Kyle to: Mandalay Bay (Burger Bar), MGM (Hakkasan), Excalibur , Luxor, New York New York, Paris, Venetian, Bellagio, Caesar's Palace, the new Aria, the chic Cosmopolitan, and of course Circus Circus where we spent a morning in the Adventure Dome.  Kyle played his first carnival game where you roll the ball into the pyramid of holes, the harder the hole, the further the horse on tops moves.  Amazingly, he came back from behind to win it, earning his Despicable Me stuffed minion.  I asked Kyle where he would stay if he were given a free week in Vegas at any hotel.  He chose Excalibur.

We ate gourmet burgers every day: Burger Bar, i (heart) burgers, and Holsteins.  They were all great, but we liked Burger Bar the best - probably because we were hungriest that day.  To balance it out, we ate Chinese food for dinner, at the very cool Hakkasan at MGM the last night to compare against the Shanghai branch.  I liked Shanghai's better.  We watched the 2014 World Cup wherever we went.

One afternoon we went off the beaten path to downtown Las Vegas to check out Tony Hsieh's rejuvenation project, Container Park.  It was very cool (on a very hot day).  We bought candy at the Sweet Spot, flavored our own snow cone, ate super BBQ at Big Ern's (Ern is really a big guy), and got our hair cut in a train car.  On the way home, the taxi driver agreed with my assessment that money doesn't buy happiness.  He proceeded to tell his own story where he came from a very wealthy family, but "escaped" when he had his daughter to avoid all the family fighting due to the wealth.  He said he never knew a bunch of people who were so unhappy and always fighting even though they had more money than they could spend.  I couldn't have paid him to tell a better story to Kyle.

We packed up, flew to LAX where I dropped Kyle off with Cheryl, and then flew up to Seattle to rejoin ML for our Washington state wine tasting tour.