If You're Afraid of Heights, You'll ALSO Hate the Sphere, and Other Las Vegas Adventures

The kid's 21st birthday bash vacation seems to have been specifically chosen to be deeply troubling for just one parent. Was she traumatizing him back for the time when she was eight years old and really pissed him off so he grounded her from the library for a week?

She's denied it, but it's awfully suspicious...

Anyway, I had an AWESOME time in Las Vegas! Our hotel room looked out on the Sphere, and every morning I could watch the sunrise over Frenchman Mountain behind it. I don't know how you drive on the streets around the Sphere at night or even live your life near it, but for a vacation, it was a sensory experience akin to a grown-up version of Cocomelon. It definitely warped the structure of my brain, but omg I could stare at it indefinitely. 

So every morning the kid I would wake up and watch the sunrise over the Sphere while eating leftovers or peanut butter sandwiches, drinking a canned coffee, and reading. I was steadily working my way through the stupidest sci-fi series I have EVER had the dismay to find myself wading through, but also I kinda had summit fever about it and so I couldn't just stop reading it, either. Mid-morning, when my partner woke up, we'd head down to the Venetian pool--

--for another few hours of lounging and reading and taking a swim when we got hot. I can't tell you when I've last hung out and relaxed by a pool--honestly, probably not since before I had kids, because after kids, even during the few times we went to a resort-level pool I'd be watching them, not relaxing. Or I'd be "relaxing" while my partner took a turn watching them, but also not really relaxing because even when it's someone else's turn to supervise you still can't forget that you have children in the water. 

So this whole genuinely relaxing by the pool business was a revelation. I LOVED it. I can't wait to get back to another pool that I can lounge and read beside and swim in for fifteen minutes every so often!

When we'd start to get hungry enough for lunch, we'd go back to our room to shower and change, and then we'd hit the Strip to see the sites and eat some food and find something weird to do. I will ALSO say that having a giant shopping mall basically in your hotel is also fucking awesome. We didn't shop in any of the stores, but there were a billion little places to eat, from expensive novelty doughnuts to expensive alcoholic slushies to expensive tacos. Everything is at theme park prices, so you just have to kind of lean in and submit to the experience. 

The canal is cornball, but still very pretty:

I cannot even believe how much people were paying for these gondola rides. Theme park pricing, indeed!

On this day, we walked over to sightsee around the Wynn, and to scope out a couple of places I wanted to visit later. Here's the Lake of Dreams, where they do short shows every half hour after dark:

Reviews of it online were VERY mixed, but it's a show, you can see it for free, and that's what we're here to do!

I also wanted to check out where this buffet was, so we could visit it on another morning:

Theme. Park. Prices! None of the stereotypical stuff that used to be cheap in Las Vegas, the shows and the buffets, are cheap anymore, probably at least partly because too many tourists like us have obviously been coming to Vegas not to gamble, but just to do the other stereotypical stuff, and no matter what, Vegas gets its money! At least I'd priced everything out beforehand, so I knew about how much we were going to be spending and I could make some choices. 

Because believe it or not, this is NOT the most expensive buffet on the Strip!

This show at Treasure Island used to be the best thing to do on the Strip, in my opinion. My partner and I were pretty bummed to see it in its current decommissioned state, with a Senor Frogs on top of it, and we stood there in the heat bitching about it together for quite some time:

After we wore ourselves out walking around in the heat, we spent a couple of hours back in our room cooling off and resting (and, in my case, watching the Sphere like it was TV), before heading back out for the event that the kid and I had been anticipating the most:

Time to worship the Sphere from the inside!

While we were there the Backstreet Boys were doing a residency at the Sphere, and I was eating my heart out that I wasn't going to one of their shows, but Jesus you wouldn't believe how expensive the tickets were, and I'd for certain be the only one of us into them. So instead I got us the nevertheless still shockingly expensive tickets to the Sphere's one-hour intro film that's supposed to show off all its cool features:

And it was... hmm. 

In the lobby are a few interactive features, robots that do a show--

--and an area where they demonstrate how the speakers can customize what sound each seating area hears, and the whole place is fancy and interesting:

And it looks really cool from above, too, when you're riding just flight after flight of these long and narrow escalators up that open space while looking down on the lobby:

But then you look over at the person next to you to point out something six flights below you that you didn't notice on the ground, and you see that person is absolutely fighting for their fucking life on this long and narrow escalator that's hanging in mid-air with nothing to look at but open air around them and the ground far, far below them. 

It is possibly the greatest achievement in the lives of many, many visitors to the Sphere that they neither vomited nor fainted on the giant Escalators of Acrophobia. 

And what's your reward when you finally make it to the level your seats are on? You have to then enter the open air of the actual Sphere dome, and scale a narrow and very vertical set of stairs to your row, then walk a very narrow path down your row, stepping over feet and around other people, the backs of the seats in the row in front reaching exactly shin height to embody the perfect tripping hazard, knowing that if you did trip, you would tumble very, very, very far. 

We were not the only party who contained someone who was absolutely beside themselves when they finally sank down into their assigned seat and commenced clinging to the armrests like their life depended on it. The kid and I entertained ourselves before the show started by watching people pull themselves up the steps hand over hand clutching the single banister that kept abruptly breaking off before commencing again a heartstopping few feet later. We saw more than one person literally crawl up the steps. We saw people get to their seat within a row by scooting their butt seat by seat, clutching the armrests as they went. We saw adults genuinely crying. Children were screaming. It was like bystanding the actual hell of a decent proportion of humanity. 

The show was very pretty and interesting on a sensory level. Definitely not worth what we paid for it, but Las Vegas! Picking apart the plot gave us a lot to talk about over the next few days, and if any of y'all have seen it, I'd still be interested in picking it apart some more! If I hadn't gone I'd probably be wishing I had, and I would like to go to a concert there, ideally one for which the graphic capabilities are utilized more thoroughly than they were for this show that was essentially a nature documentary. 

But overall, if you're just a tourist and just in Las Vegas for a few days so you need to be choosy about what you do, the Sphere is cooler from the outside. 

Also, on the way out, point any acrophobic people in your party to the elevators. There are only a few compared to the masses of people seeking exit, and they were guarded by employees, but my partner had no issue gaining access and made it to the ground floor long before we did and having suffered no additional trauma.

Wouldn't it have been hilarious, in a horrifying way, if the elevators had been glass?

After the show, we moseyed back to the Wynn to claim spots to see the Lake of Dreams show. There is one single balcony from which you can watch the show for free without having to patronize the expensive bar or more expensive restaurant, with only a few tables and chairs set up, but most of the people in those prime positions tended to clear out after each short show, so we didn't have to wait long before we, too, had prime positions:

Then all we had to do was grab drinks from the bar and hang out in comfort, picking apart Postcards from the Earth while we waited!

I'd told everybody to manage their expectations, because again, reviews are VERY mixed. And indeed, the first show that we stood to the back of the balcony during was pretty cornball and forgettable. But you guys. All three of us, even the two of us who don't particularly enjoy music, FREAKED OUT with excitement when this happened:

 
The younger kid didn't come with us on this trip, but we are all WELL versed and very conditioned by her multi-year, and clearly permanent at this point, love of David Bowie. We all, no matter our individual interest in music, recognize all the most iconic David Bowie songs, and they all have a special place in the heart of our family, and we're all excited whenever we hear one out in the wild.

So we were all so excited by this particularly bizarre turn of events!

As soon as it was over, I tried to send the kid a couple of the videos I'd taken, and she was all, "um what am i looking at?!?"

It was a very weird, PERFECT Las Vegas experience.

Here's a random antique gondola accompanying a display on the history of gondolas that we found on the way back to our room:

In my opinion, the perfect ending to the perfect day in Vegas consists of sitting in your hotel room, freshly showered and wearing comfy pajamas, eating take-out dinner from one of the billion food places still open in the middle of the night, drinking whiskey on ice out of a wine glass, and watching your lord and savior, the Sphere:

It's more of the same tomorrow, plus Cirque du Soleil!

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!