Day 22 - Williams to Las Vegas

Friday, May 25, 2018

Weather:  Sunny and high 80’s

Steps: Shaun - 15,902, Shannon - 14,036

With sad hearts, we left the Grand Circle area after checking out of the Grand Canyon Railway Hotel and eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the car (we are officially in get-rid-of-shit mode). The drive to Las Vegas took 3 ½ hours, with a short stop at the Lake Mead Visitor Center.

Once we arrived in Vegas, we went to the Writer’s Block Bookstore that Shannon had found online, which turned out to be a very eclectic store. We stayed there for a half hour or so and then checked out some antique stores in the Art District and ate at an interesting hipster-type place called Esther’s Kitchen. We didn’t find anything of substance in the area, so we headed off to The Bellagio.

Since this was our final resting place, we needed to deal with the insane amount of crap we’d gathered over the last 22 days. First though, we had to get it into our room, and we were definitely not prepared to have it valeted, so we parked in the parking structure and conned a very nice bellhop to accompany us and escort us and our stuff to our room. I got us registered, and after about 5 hours (ok, maybe a bit of an exaggeration), Shannon and Mr. Bellhop showed up. In her defense, getting all our stuff on one luggage cart required all of Shannon’s superior organization skills.

The unfortunate thing about The Bellagio is that the guest rooms can only be accessed by walking all the way through the casino. Shan and I noticed that it was kind of smoky, and we thought how rude it was that someone was smoking in a public building (we found out later that it’s legal to smoke in a casino in Vegas). I’m not kidding when I say that it was probably a mile from the lobby to our room, but we made it eventually. The bellman was very nice and taught us the whys and wherefores of staying in a luxury hotel:

1) A bottle of water is $20 on Friday and $25 on Saturday.

2) If you pick anything up from either the snack bar or the mini fridge, you have 10 seconds to put it back or you’ll be charged for it. The way they figure this out is that the surfaces contain pressure plates that register the change in weight. Seriously.

3) You aren’t allowed to store anything of your own in the mini bar. The aforementioned pressure plates are also utilized to determine extra weight as well as missing weight. This presented a problem for us because we had a full cooler of food that needed a home.

Needless to say, this will be our first and last time staying at The Bellagio….

We spent the rest of the day checking out the stores in and around the Bellagio, the beautiful flower display at the Conservatory, got some Starbucks, and walked to the Venetian among a cadre of insane people. It turned out that we had entered into The Twilight Zone because the brand new franchised hockey team called The Knights from Vegas were in the Stanley Cup playoffs, and every fool in the country was flooding into the city and drinking as much as humanly possible before the game (which was naturally taking place in Vegas….I mean of course it was, right?). They even put a jersey and hockey stick on Caesar in front of Caesar’s Palace Hotel!

Since we only had one more day left, we decided to eat more crap out of the cooler for dinner, packed our shipping boxes, and then watched Men in Black and Despicable Me simultaneously.  It was a rip roarin’ good time.