Today I have a helicopter tour of the Grand Canyon booked and I get picked up at 1:35pm so i decided to stay fairly close to the hotel and explore the Bellagio and Caesars Palace in a little more depth. I noticed that the Bellagio has a Monet exhibition on at the moment so I grabbed a coffee and pastry at one of the Cafes in the Bellagio and then went to see the Monet exhibition. It has been organised in partnership with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. This particular exhibition features works that illustrate the height of Claude Monet's engagement with colour and light and includes 'Grainstack (sunset)', 1891 and 'Camille Monet and a child in the artists garden in Argenteuil', 1875. It is a collection of about 20 paintings by Monet and there are also some paintings by Monet's predecessors and contemporaries, including Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Camille Pissarro, and Eugene Louis Boudin. After the exhibition I walked through and browsed the shops at the Bellagio and Caesars. They have a lot more of the high end fashion stores here like Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Christian Loubiton etc. I did go into Christian Loubiton but nothing grabbed me...except the price...which is about half of what you would pay in Australia. If I had seen some that I liked I may have considered making a purchase.I then headed over to the Aria Casino which is across the road and also connected to the Vdara for my pick up for the helicopter ride. I chose Maverick helicopters because everyone I know who has done this in Vegas have all used them...and because they have an outstanding safety record!!!! Not that I was worried or anything ;). This is my first time in a helicopter and I was definitely a little nervous. I wasn't sure if I was going to freak out or not, but I figured if I managed the hot air balloon in Turkey with ease, then surely this wouldn't be so bad. Once you get to the airport they check your details...and weigh you with all your stuff...and then your pilot calls the group you will be travelling in. On my helicopter were two girls from South Australia and a Latino mother and son. Joel our pilot told me and the two girls to hop in the front of the helicopter...OMG. The girls from South Australia were not quite sure about the helicopter...and the 3 of us were not the smallest girls either...so we squished inside the front, I was jammed up against the glass door! Then off we went...about 7 helicopters in total. Now I'm not going to lie...but I was nervous, and every dip I wondered if this was the last! Joel did say that because it was a little windy it may be a bit bumpy. We flew over Hoover Dam, a concrete arch-gravity dam in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River on the border between the US states of Arizona and Nevada. It was built between 1931 and 1936 during the Great Depression. It's construction was the result of a massive effort involving thousands of workers which also cost over 100 lives. It also meant that because there was so many people there earning money, that casinos were built...and the city of Las Vegas grew from about 5,000 people to a city of 10,000-20,000 people. We then continued onto the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon is a steep-sided canyon carved by the Colorado River. It is 446km long and 29km wide. Nearly two billion years of the Earth's geological history has been exposed as the Colorado River and its tributaries cut their channels through layer after layer of rock while the Colorado Plateau was uplifted. For thousands of years the area has continuously been inhabited by native Americans who built settlements within the canyon and its many caves. We landed in one of the canyons and were offered some champagne and snacks and the opportunity to take some photos. It really was breathtaking. Did I also mention the date...12/12/12??? So there was LOTS of weddings in Vegas today and one of the helicopters was also filled with a wedding party, they had their own private outcrop of rock though! We were probably in the canyon about 30-45 minutes and then it was time to head off again. This time we sat in the back and we had a small stop for a refuel on the way back. As we headed back towards Vegas we could see the lights and they took us up the Strip to view the lights of the Casinos before heading back to the airport.
Because I had got back to the hotel earlier than I thought I would head up to see the Fremont Street Experience. This is a pedestrian mall and attraction in downtown Las Vegas. The attraction is a barrel vault canopy and covers four blocks and each night they turn off the outside casino lights while a light show is shown on the canopy above. The first hotel in Vegas was in Fremont Street and the 'Golden Nugget' was the first structure designed from the ground up to be a casino. The Golden Nugget was also on the news tonight when I got home because its restaurants had been shut down due to poor hygiene and cockraoches! I didn't stay here long as I felt a little unsafe walking around here on my own. It was a different crowd to the strip so I found the first taxi I could and headed up to the shopping outlets to buy another suitcase. Once I dropped the bag off at the hotel I went and had a look through New York New York and MGM. I also had dinner at an Italian restaurant while in New York New York. I'm not sure what I was expecting from MGM but I was a little disappointed. It was full of people though...lots of cowboys as the rodeo is in town this week. I stopped at the M&M shop on the way back to the hotel :)
No comments:
Post a Comment