Escape to Los Angeles

Las Vegas was a real experience, but we admit to heaving sighs of relief on landing safely back in Los Angeles.  Yesterday we had an unplanned day to spend in Vegas; the only thing we had sorted in advance was a dinner show at Excalibur at 6pm.  We didn't bother with breakfast as we had had such a wonderful dinner at Mon Ami Gabi the night before.

Chocolate Fountain

We started by walking back down to Bellagio, as they had an exhibition of paintings by Claude Monet showing in the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art.  While we had successfully found the box office for the gallery on Tuesday night, on our wander back after Cirque du Soleil, the same task eluded us in daylight.  We found the main foyer again, and then found the largest chocolate fountain in the world (conveniently located next to a gelato shop, very nice gelato it was too).  We had seen this place on Tuesday too although at 10.30 pm we thought it was just a beautiful glass sculpture rather than a chocolate fountain.  Eventually though we had to resort to asking directions to the gallery.

The paintings were absolutely beautiful, as expected.  We didn’t bother with a catalogue as the printed pictures just cannot do the real thing justice.  Despite modern printing technology the colours just don’t compare.  After a slow wander round admiring 20 wonderful Monet paintings, we exited the Bellagio near the fountains.  Although it was nearly 1pm, the fountains were having maintenance done so weren’t playing at that time.

Our tiredness from all the walking and trying to avoid people peddling everything from show tickets to hookers was starting to catch up to us.  We spent over half an hour fruitlessly wandering around in the labyrinth that is the Paris and Bally casinos before finding somewhere for lunch.  While we had originally planned to go done to old Las Vegas and see the Mob Museum we had just had enough.  We made our way back to Luxor and spent a quiet afternoon reading and drinking (beer for Grant and tea for me!).

At 5.30 we started our trek to Excalibur.  Even though it is just next door, the route twists and turns on itself (clearly the intention is to lose customers inside the casino so they gamble in despair, having failed to escape).  We stopped at The Dragons Lair gift shop to get dragon t-shirts to wear to the Tournament of Kings feast as we were seated in the Dragon section (the bad guy).  The show was corny and twee – just as we expected so it was great fun.  There were quite a few people there with kids so we tried to play up to it.  The feast itself consisted of ‘dragon blood soup’, and a main course of a small roast chicken (each!), roast potatoes and broccoli.  This was a medieval feast so of course there were no untensils to eat with!  Luckily they were kind enough to provide a moist towel to clean up with.  The arena was divided into countries (France, Ireland, Norway, Russia, Austria, Hungary) plus the Dragon section we were in.  Each country had a king to represent them, and much mock jousting and duelling was enjoyed by all.  And yes, they did ride real horses.  The Dragon knight rode a beautiful black Fresian, what a gorgeous horse!

We had no more plans after this, so we made an early night of it.  We were pretty tired after a very late night on Wednesday.  Also we were finding at a bit hard to sleep well with the dryness of the air-conditioning.

Our flight to LA wasn’t until 1.15pm, so we had a bit of time to kill this morning.  We had some breakfast in the hotel café before exploring some of the hotel that we hadn’t yet managed to see.  We did end up heading out to the airport not long after 11 o’clock and even found a crossword book to keep us entertained.

Ian met us at LAX and we have had a lovely quiet afternoon.  We have booked our train tickets for Canada so that is now definite (very exciting thought) and enjoyed a leisurely home-cooked meal with Jo and Ian while watching some cricket (sad) and some Super 15 rugby (better).