Road trip goes Vegas

After a 3-day internet free period it’s finally possible to write a blog post. Though we were staying in the best hotel so far on our USA trip, the internet wasn’t included in the room prices and the fee was really high to be honest. But anyway, the trip to Vegas lasted from Sunday till Wednesday morning and on Tuesday we visited the Grand Canyons but more of them you’ll get in the next post. 

The Sunday morning begun with a Hawaii style breakfast 10 miles outside San Diego. Due to the long drive ahead we decided to leave SD as early as possible and not to spend any time there anymore. With a nice warming sunshine and about 15’C degrees we hit the road. It didn’t take long for the landscape to change from the green coastal region to a dry desert with some small mountains. After leaving the coast there wasn’t much settlement but somehow people had managed to build two massive outlet centers in the middle of nowhere :) The view was still nearly all the time beautiful to look at and definitely something none of us had ever seen before.  The drive went well and smoothly and after around 5 hours Las Vegas skyline rose in front of our eyes. We headed directly to the 350m high Stratosphere Tower hotel to check-in and to look for a place to eat. The hotel itself consists of over 2400 rooms in 24 levels and we were pretty lucky as we got a room from the 23rd level with a nice view south the Strip. Next to the hotel there was a cheap pizza buffet which was perfect for us :) We didn’t have any exact plans for the first evening, we just wanted to see how Vegas is. For the most part we were at our hotel’s casino. Lauri is the biggest gambler from us four but none of us really did gamble during the whole time in Vegas since the minimum odds for the table weren’t that student-friendly :) All in all we continued being bad tourists as we’re staying in the cheapest hotels, eating in cheap restaurants and giving the lowest tips. 

Day 2 started with some rain showers! It does rain in Vegas.. Our plans for the day were just to walk around the city to see the attractions and some shows the hotels and casinos are showing each night several times. We didn’t have enough time to see everything on that one night so we made another city walk on the second evening too. With our budgets the coolest parts in Vegas were certainly these shows and the houses around Las Vegas Boulevards “The Strip”. We did watch the shows by Treasure Island, Mirage and Bellagio. Despite the Strip, the view from our hotel’s observation deck was beautiful too. Below you can find some pictures of them. Having left Vegas now, I can say that it was nice to see it but there’s no need to go back there. At least, not before having that much money that it doesn’t matter how much I’m spending.. One funny fact to mention is that I think there were more Chinese people than Americans due to Chinese New Year on January 23rd.