Flights, Fore, Fantasy
No lie in for us today, we were up at 6:30 to take a helicopter ride to the Grand Canyon! Yes, Sarah actually got in a helicopter, a very small, flimsy helicopter that felt like it was dangling from a thread as we bobbed along, praying that the Perspex door I was pressed up against wouldn’t pop open at 5,000ft.
Captain Chris flew us over the Hoover Dam on the way to the Grand Canyon and over Lake Mead, the lake created by the Dam and the largest lake in North America. We didn’t fly very far along the canyon, but it’s hard to see the full 227 miles of the canyon’s length in one flight. We did fly over the canyon’s rim and landed at the base, 1 mile below the rim. It lived up to its name as it was huge whether we looked at it from the canyon floor or from above in the helicopter. The canyon is 6 million years old (glad we didn’t turn up last year when it was only 5,999,999 years old!) and has formed because the Colorado River and the desert winds have eroded the soft rock. It was interesting to see the Grand Canyon and we would have liked more time to appreciate it, but the trip was more about riding in a helicopter than see some hole in the ground.
Back at the hotel, we went for a quick swim. A very quick swim as the water was very cold and again got the 2pm shuttle bus to the Strip and walked to the Bali Hai golf club. This is a bit of an expensive course to play, but we thought we’d treat ourselves and we wanted to get pictures of the Strip from the golf course so this limited our choice. Sarah doesn’t play golf but loves driving the buggies. At least this time she managed to confine her skids to the remote fairways and not right in front of the club house as she’d done in Morocco.
We were asked to join up with another couple, Mike and Beverley from “DC”. Like us, Mike was golfing and Beverley was driving the buggy. It was a well presented and difficult course, but we had a good time and I played quite well.
After the golf we got a taxi with Mike and Beverley to Harrah’s hotel half way up the Strip. Sarah and I walked to the Fashion Mall shopping centre, which looks like it is just a few shops when you see it form the road, but is at least the size of Blue Water inside. We had Chinese meal from a food court and then walked to Frontier casino to go to Gilley’s Western Bar to have some good clean fun at the women’s mud wrestling competition. We knew the wrestling started at 10pm and, being the organised people we are we got there at 9:30pm, just as the entrance fee period started. Grr! What made us more annoyed was that there were no seats available, the music was horrendously loud and the mud wrestling started an hour late. I made it worse by pointing out that the bar was being run by a bunch of cowboys!
I was disappointed with the mud wrestling as we didn’t see a single drop-kick, clothes-line or sleeper hold, so after a couple of bouts we left and walked to the new Wynn Hotel for the grand opening. Steve Wynn, the owner of the new hotel, has pretty much built all the famous hotels in Vegas, it’s his play town. There were huge crowds outside and we waited expectantly for a big fireworks show when the hotel opened at midnight. Vegas is all about glitz and razzamatazz everyday of the year so we expected something special for the opening of a new casino. Boy did we get a surprise; the only fireworks were on the big advertising screen outside the hotel and lasted a full five seconds and that was it. Very disappointing and to make matters worse, the huge crowds pilling onto the roads made it really difficult to get a taxi home. We eventually persuaded Mike-the-Greek to give us a ride home and we listened to him tell how he hated Vegas because it was corrupted by the mob (He actually said “Trusts me. I knows people.”), how he never gambled (“Is all fixed”), how he was going to move back to Greece, and how he’d lived in Vegas for a mere 26 years.
Captain Chris flew us over the Hoover Dam on the way to the Grand Canyon and over Lake Mead, the lake created by the Dam and the largest lake in North America. We didn’t fly very far along the canyon, but it’s hard to see the full 227 miles of the canyon’s length in one flight. We did fly over the canyon’s rim and landed at the base, 1 mile below the rim. It lived up to its name as it was huge whether we looked at it from the canyon floor or from above in the helicopter. The canyon is 6 million years old (glad we didn’t turn up last year when it was only 5,999,999 years old!) and has formed because the Colorado River and the desert winds have eroded the soft rock. It was interesting to see the Grand Canyon and we would have liked more time to appreciate it, but the trip was more about riding in a helicopter than see some hole in the ground.
Back at the hotel, we went for a quick swim. A very quick swim as the water was very cold and again got the 2pm shuttle bus to the Strip and walked to the Bali Hai golf club. This is a bit of an expensive course to play, but we thought we’d treat ourselves and we wanted to get pictures of the Strip from the golf course so this limited our choice. Sarah doesn’t play golf but loves driving the buggies. At least this time she managed to confine her skids to the remote fairways and not right in front of the club house as she’d done in Morocco.
We were asked to join up with another couple, Mike and Beverley from “DC”. Like us, Mike was golfing and Beverley was driving the buggy. It was a well presented and difficult course, but we had a good time and I played quite well.
After the golf we got a taxi with Mike and Beverley to Harrah’s hotel half way up the Strip. Sarah and I walked to the Fashion Mall shopping centre, which looks like it is just a few shops when you see it form the road, but is at least the size of Blue Water inside. We had Chinese meal from a food court and then walked to Frontier casino to go to Gilley’s Western Bar to have some good clean fun at the women’s mud wrestling competition. We knew the wrestling started at 10pm and, being the organised people we are we got there at 9:30pm, just as the entrance fee period started. Grr! What made us more annoyed was that there were no seats available, the music was horrendously loud and the mud wrestling started an hour late. I made it worse by pointing out that the bar was being run by a bunch of cowboys!
I was disappointed with the mud wrestling as we didn’t see a single drop-kick, clothes-line or sleeper hold, so after a couple of bouts we left and walked to the new Wynn Hotel for the grand opening. Steve Wynn, the owner of the new hotel, has pretty much built all the famous hotels in Vegas, it’s his play town. There were huge crowds outside and we waited expectantly for a big fireworks show when the hotel opened at midnight. Vegas is all about glitz and razzamatazz everyday of the year so we expected something special for the opening of a new casino. Boy did we get a surprise; the only fireworks were on the big advertising screen outside the hotel and lasted a full five seconds and that was it. Very disappointing and to make matters worse, the huge crowds pilling onto the roads made it really difficult to get a taxi home. We eventually persuaded Mike-the-Greek to give us a ride home and we listened to him tell how he hated Vegas because it was corrupted by the mob (He actually said “Trusts me. I knows people.”), how he never gambled (“Is all fixed”), how he was going to move back to Greece, and how he’d lived in Vegas for a mere 26 years.
posted by Ian @ 1:31 am
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