A Robot Made Me a Cocktail, and Then We Went to the Circus: More Adventures in Las Vegas

 Look at my luck, having the perfect view of so many beautiful sunrises on this trip!

Of all the cool Sphere displays I saw from my hotel window, my favorite iteration is the Moon that shines overnight. I wake up pretty early even when my body isn't on East Coast time, so I got to enjoy a lot of the Moon over peanut butter sandwiches and canned coffee and terrible sci-fi novels. For a tacky spectacle every other hour of the day, the Moon Sphere is genuinely lovely and charming and magical.

We mixed up our usual schedule on this day, because we wanted to hit the Wynn buffet during its slightly less outrageous but still very outrageous brunch pricing. 

The prices genuinely are outrageous, but I feel like the buffet did its part to make it worth it:

The signage claimed that these decorations were made entirely of confectionary, which I thought was pretty impressive.

I'm kind of low-key addicted to charcuterie, so I was delighted by this section and made myself my own little charcuterie tray. They had black cheese!

And obviously if somebody is making bespoke crepes, you HAVE to get one!

Crepes, meat, a gourmet tater tot that did not live up to the hype, hot chocolate, and the kid has clearly found the sushi and dumpling section.

Chorizo street taco, ube pudding, and I also found where the dumplings lived!

The kid is a particularly adventurous eater, so she had a fabulous time trying all the new-to-us foods, and my partner had a fabulous time eating every meat on offer. I just genuinely love buffets, and although COVID nearly broke me of that, I'm calm enough now that when a buffet looks very sanitary and tidy and organized, I can get back into that halcyon happy place I lived in before I knew what a global pandemic looks like. 

I sent this photo to the kid at home, who was suitably impressed. She gets through a LOT of kimchee when she's home!

And, of course, someone special is 21 years old today, so we have to have some special desserts to celebrate!

We did not have to be rolled out of the buffet afterwards, but it was a close thing.

Better go back to our room, change into swimsuits, and spend a few hours lounging by the pool while we digest!

Later that afternoon, it was time to give the 21-year-old kid a proper introduction to the casino floor. None of us are really the gambling type, but when in Vegas, etc. etc.

The casino is actually a LOT less fun than it was back in the day, because most of it is computerized and digital. You don't even get to pull an actual lever to operate the slot machines anymore--it's all video style with push buttons and ridiculous animations! And, like, everything in the world is computerized and animated these days, so it's not even worth doing it for the novelty, much less the poor odds. The stupidest thing I saw, though, is how many of the table games have switched over to be automated and/or computerized. You can't even get human interaction while playing poker anymore! And I literally saw an automated craps game, with people sitting quietly around a pneumatic-looking tube containing dice that rolled themselves. 

Anyway, none of that bullshit for MY kid! My partner escorted her around to a few different types of table games so she could learn the rules and experience the joy of getting poor quickly, lol, but ONLY the table games that had a real dealer, because WE want an authentic old-school Las Vegas, thank you very much. The kid quickly became famous, because whenever she and her sweet baby face sat down at a table, the dealer would greet her while immediately turning on the "help" light to call the pit boss over, who'd then check her ID, wish her a Happy Birthday, and give her some free drink tickets. She'd play a couple of hands of whatever, lose a little money, and then go find a different table with a different game to experience losing money at. She'd sit herself and her sweet baby face down, the dealer would greet her while flagging down the pit boss, and the entire exchange would repeat itself. I'm surprised the pit boss didn't just stick with her, since he kept having to come back to see her every ten minutes!

In the end, she did not win a penny, but she lost 15 dollars less than we'd budgeted for spending at the casino, and she made out like an absolute bandit with free drink tickets, so honestly--I think we came away with a net gain!

Of COURSE the bar that we'd been waiting to try until the day of her birthday didn't take drink tickets, but whatever--the kid wanted her very first legal drink to be served by a robot, and so that's what we did!

The kid is actually not really a drinker, so she didn't like her Tequila Sunrise (I tried to warn her about tequila, but she was choosing based on which menu illustration looked the prettiest), so I had to drink it along with my own robot-mixed margarita, but whatever. Life is tough sometimes!

And that's how I hit the streets of the Strip with a drink in each hand:

The kid did not know a thing about Siegfried and Roy so my partner and I regaled her with the full story, talking over each other in excitement because we love horrifying gossip the MOST.

The plan was to take our very sweet time walking down to the Bellagio, as we had Cirque du Soleil tickets that night, so we spent quite a long time wandering in Caesar's Palace. We rode one of the only three spiral escalators in the United States, and admired every single god and goddess in the mall:

Gotta take a photo of Athena to send to my kid back home--she's her school's patroness!

The mall is basically the same style as the one in the Venetian--stores have thematically-appropriate facades, and the ceiling is bewitched to look like the sky outside--

--but I like Ancient Greece more than I like Venice, so I really enjoyed the vibe.

They also have a beautiful aquarium that has some cool broken statuary in it. Very atmospheric:

We were there specifically to see the Fall of Atlantis, a free show that runs on the hour during a very limited time period, so we really wanted to make the effort to see it and waited quite a while for the next showing.

We were there early enough that we got excellent placement front and center in what was actually a pretty sizeable crowd, so we had the best view of what is possibly the worst animatronic show that I have ever seen in my life:

I think most of the effects were kind of broken? Because there's no way it was meant to look that janky and stupid. It was pretty cool when the monster came out at the end, though:

When the show ended, a few people sort of clapped, but the woman standing next to me BOOED! It was hilarious. Like, it's fully automated--there is nobody there to accept your criticism!

OMG you guys. I just Googled the show because I wanted to know what the monster's name is. I didn't find it because I got distracted by a YouTube video of the show, IN WHICH THERE ARE A BUNCH OF FLAMES THAT EXPLODE OUT DURING THE CLIMAX!!! My show did NOT have a bunch of flames! WTF!?!

By the time we made it back out onto the Strip, loudly roasting the Fall of Atlantis as we went, night had fallen:

This was the first time we'd been this far south on the Strip on this trip, and the first time we'd been on the Strip at night, and I haaaaaated this combo! Further north and earlier in the day, there was always a constant low level of buskers and scammers attempting to sell you $50 photos or get you to buy their CDs or prayer beads or whatever, and a constant undercurrent of drunk idiots stumbling around, but honestly, it was basically any Saturday at home when you're trying to walk downtown to the library but there's a home football game that day and maybe it's also Parents Weekend. 

But dude, at night and in the busiest part of the Strip? Omg what a sensory nightmare. All the buskers had speaker systems. All the scammers were in giant costumes--who is wanting to pay fifty bucks to get their photo taken with a guy in a giant Bluey costume in front of the fake Eiffel Tower? All the tourists were drunk and standing in big groups in the middle of the sidewalk shouting at each other. This one drunk dude in front of us literally put his cup down ON THE SIDEWALK so he could take a selfie and when the big kid, not noticing, kicked it over as she passed, he started screaming, "THAT BITCH KNOCKED OVER MY DRIIIIIINK!!!!" and lunged for her. I was behind them, so I was all, "Well, shit. I'm about to get in a fight," but fortunately, his equally drunk but less violent pals pulled him back. 

The kid wisely didn't even stop, so I think she could have escaped him even if I hadn't been a half-second from leaping onto his back like a pro wrestler. 

There was an absolute mob in front of the Bellagio Fountains, but they were still pretty!

Another huge mistake we made was in scheduling our Cirque du Soleil show. I don't even know how much attention we paid to the start time for "O," because the ticket price and the seats were what we wanted, but dude, it did not start until 9:30 PM. Like, by 9:30 on the East Coast I'm already sleepy and getting ready for bed, and this was 9:30 West Coast time--by 9:30 West Coast time I've usually been snoozing for two hours! And I'd been enjoying all those West Coast sunrises by getting up at my usual East Coast time, sooo... 

"O" was beautiful and enchanting and thrilling and surprising and I spent the majority of it dozing on my partner's shoulder.

One day I want to go back so I can actually appreciate it, ideally via a matinee showing:

The fresh air woke me up a little bit, and the post-midnight chaos on the Strip was very slightly less, so I even had the energy to watch one more fountain show--

--before making the long slog back to the Venetian.

Tomorrow is our last day!

And here's the rest of our trip!

• Day 1: Omega Mart and Driving to the Grand Canyon
• Day 2: Grand Canyon National Park
• Day 3: Vegas Strip, The Sphere, and the Lake of Dreams
• Day 4: Wynn Buffet, Caesar's Palace, Bellagio Fountains, and Cirque du Soleil
• Day 5: Walking Tour of the Strip and a Red-Eye Home!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!