Las Vegas How It Should Be
When there is no time for a proper two-week vacation, the next best thing is a micro-vacation. A micro-vacation, in my definition, is a 4-day getaway to disconnect from the normal life routine and recharge intellectual and emotional batteries. This spring we decided to have two of these: one we’ll do around Memorial Day weekend and go to Yosemite, and the other one we did just recently going to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon.
As usual, it all started with smart advanced planning and getting a deal on a hotel. We were lucky to book one of the best hotels on the Las Vegas Strip — The Palazzo — with a 53%-off deal. Then we invited a couple of friends to join us and share a car drive. Yes, we went by car, because none of us has driven through the desert ever before and we were all excited about it. And I must say that when you do it the first time it’s not boring at all. Quite the contrary, the endless road that goes perfectly straight all the way into the horizon and the monotonous cosmic scenery on the sides seemed very beautiful.
All three people besides myself were visiting Las Vegas for the first time and all of them found it to be much better than they had imagined. Our mood was upbeat and we felt lucky, as every place we went to pleasantly surprised us. In fact, by the third day we felt so lucky that the ladies even concluded that they would not gamble, as to not tempt our luck. The original plan had been that they would spend the total of $20 on gambling. But we ended up leaving Las Vegas without wasting a single dollar to gambling. Instead we spent money on delicious food, great entertainment, and partying.
We checked out a couple of nightclubs. One of them called XS (located inside the Wynn hotel) was especially nice. By an accident we got a chance to hear and see David Guetta playing there, who I was told is a world-class DJ. And I must admit there is probably some truth to it as the music and the atmosphere were great.
We also went to a Cirque du Soleil show called “Love” and dedicated to The Beatles. It was a lot of fun to see those great acrobatic performances accompanied by some of our favorite songs.
But the most memorable attraction of all was, without a doubt, the Grand Canyon. We did a day trip to the South Rim, and again, we were lucky to conclude our tour under beautiful wether narrowly escaping a huge storm that started literally the moment we headed back. We were impressed with the magnificence of the thing. I imagined it to be huge, but it turned out to be even bigger. In fact, at times the views seemed totally surreal and the brain refused to comprehend such a scale.
On our way back we were already searching for the next available hotel and airplane deals to Las Vegas, which is a sure sign that this particular micro-vacation was fantastic.