Las Vegas, Nevada – December 2021 – Sam and Katelyn's Travels

December 9, 2021 – December 11, 2021

Trip Highlights:

First time gambling
Exploring hotels on the Strip
Fremont Street

Favorite Restaurants:

La Salsa Cantina

For this trip, we left Sam at home and I traveled to Las Vegas with my mom. Our flight left early in the morning, getting us in to Vegas about halfway through the day. We were staying at the Vdara on the strip, so we took an Uber and settled in to our hotel before heading out to begin exploring the strip.

Our first stop was lunch at the Bellagio Buffet next door. We originally chose the Bellagio Buffet because we had heard that they had great seafood options on their buffet, including crab legs. Unfortunately, either because of Covid or because it was a week day, the buffet didn’t have any crab legs when we visited. I did have some steak and we both had the fish, as well as a bunch of desserts. The food was good, but a bit overly buttery.

We also wandered through the Bellagio, looking at some of their Christmas displays and the World’s Largest Chocolate Fountain.

We took a little break at the hotel before exploring more of the strip. We started off heading on the monorail to Park MGM and taking a look at some of the casino games. We put in a couple dollars, tried playing a few, but were not 100% sure how these games really worked, so we decided to come back the next day after we could look into the rules a bit more.

We wandered back through the Bellagio and continued down the strip to Ceasar’s Palace. It was fun to see all of the Christmas decorations up at this hotel as well. We walked and walked through this long hotel until we hit the forum shops, which were designed to look like an ancient courtyard, complete with faux blue skies on the ceiling. We watched a bit of an animatronic show before turning around and walking back toward our hotel for the night.

One nice thing about our room was that they overlooked the Bellagio fountain show. While we couldn’t hear the music from our room, we were able to watch the show every fifteen minutes at night as it went off outside of our window.

Our second full day started off exploring the strip in the other direction than we did the day before. We began at the New York New York hotel, which was designed to look like 1940s New York City. This was my favorite hotel to walk through. I really thought it did a good job of immersing you into old NYC. Inside this hotel was the Hershey’s shop, which was complete with models of the Statue of Libery made out of Hershey’s Chocolate and Twizzlers. We didn’t buy anything here, but it was cool to wander through.

Outside of New York New York is the Excalibur hotel, which we didn’t go into, but looked at the medieval castle from the outside. We walked down the strip to two more themed stores, one for Coca Cola and one for M & Ms. Both were neat to walk through, but we didn’t purchase anything.

Our next stop of the day was Fremont Street, the old area of Vegas with the historical casinos and hotels. Here at the Fremont Hotel was the first place we tried gambling. Early in our time there we won about $45 on a slot machine, and spent the rest of our time there that morning playing other machines on that single winning. We spent about an hour here and didn’t leave with any money, though we only spent about $5 total for us to play that entire time.

Other than the casino, Fremont street was interesting to walk through. There was a large lit up screen above the street showing different pictures, and a bunch of touristy shops to wander through. Down the street from Fremont Street was the Downtown Container Park, a little shopping center made up of shipping containers, which we also wandered through before heading back to our hotel.

For dinner, we walked across the street to the Miracle Mile to eat at La Salsa Cantina. The Miracle Mile shops were also designed to look like a street with a false blue sky as a ceiling. The food at La Salsa Cantina was great, and we even decided to eat there the following day of our trip as well. We spent some time that night at The Miracle Mile Shops, exploring some of the shops, gambling in their casino, and getting drinks from the Robot Bar (see the video below!).

Our final full day started at the Venetian Hotel, wandering through their canals themed after Venice. We saw the Gondoliers start their day with a march through the streets and watched a few of them serenade people along the canals as well.

We also explored the Paris hotel, though this one was much smaller than we expected it to be. The casino looked like it was at the base of the Eiffel tower, and there were a couple of cute alleyways filled with shops to explore as well.

Because today was a Saturday, everywhere we went was much more crowded than it had been the days before. We intended to go back to the Coca Cola store to try out their international beverages (which had been closed when we visited the day before) but the store was packed, so we decided to skip that on this trip.

We spent some time back at Planet Hollywood, and as we were spending what we had decided was our last dollar for the day, we ended up winning just under $30 dollars, the first prize we actually cashed out on this trip. We did accidentally spend half of this on sodas at the Park MGM across the street immediately after winning, but oh well!

The last thing we did for the evening was finally see the Bellagio Fountain show from the ground level next to the fountains. We had been watching the fountains from our room for days at this point, but this was the only time we watched the show with the music from the ground next to the fountains. It was very cool to see and feel the mist from the fountains as they danced along with the music.