Sin City

Pic 1: Flying over Greenland

Pic 2: Outside Las Vegas at Primm Valley where we went for some retail therapy. Some serious rollercoaster!

Pic 3: The is the famous Las Vegas Blvd or otherwise known as 'The Strip'.

Firstly, I have to apologize for the delay in updating the blogspot, due to certain circumstances (which I will explain)…..

Viva Las Vegas
We are here! A good few hours later, and we’ve landed safely. Despite a few bumps in the road and a bit of turbulence here and there, we managed to get here with a few stories to tell and minus 2 bags.

Travelers Cheques? What travelers cheques?
So my dearest decides to get travelers cheques this time around, you know for safety reasons and so forth. Well, just as well he did. In my state of excitement, I placed the cheques in the front of the 4x4, out of sight as we all know in South Africa you don’t leave things lying around for everyone to see. And so I left them just there and off we go without the travelers cheques. Luckily we can cancel them and have them reissued. The only problem is to actually get those guys to cancel them and to tell us where we ca pick the new ones up. We’re still without them, but at least we have credit cards!

DBN->JHB->LND
Between Durban, Johannesburg and London, noting exciting happened. We didn’t sleep much as cattle class is just what it is. Uncomfortable, painful and plain annoying! The one thing I have to say is that I have never experienced a landing a smooth as we did at Heathrow. It was unbelievable. I didn’t even realize we landed until I looked out the window and saw we’re on the ground!

Virgin Atlantic…..We’ve seen better!
I can think of a millions ways that Virgin Atlantic could've made our flight to Las Vegas less painful and more fun! They gave us this old crappy plane that only shows 10ish movies instead of the 51 they promise as we had on the plane between Jo-‘burg and London. Also between JHB and LND you could watch the movies on demand whereas the last flight they only showed every 2-3 hours and if you missed the beginning,… well tough luck. To add insult to this minor injury, they had the audacity to split me and Kurt. We got to sit separately, with neither of us with an isle seat for 10 straight hours. I won’t say more.

But the best is that these incompetent people somehow couldn’t get the doors to the cargo hold open and therefore could only get a few bags out. I was lucky that my two bags came out. Kurt on the other hand had to do without his two bags. But what we didn’t think of immediately is that some of my things had been packed into the other two bags, including my laptop charger. Which is one participating factors in the delay for updating the blogspot.

What is so ironic about this situation is that most planes including Virgin Atlantic planes are apparently build in Seattle (please note that this is all hearsay). Instead of calling out someone from America to help them out, they wanted to fly the plane back to London to get the engineers to fix it there and then fly our bags out back to Las Vegas. Our bags were delivered the next morning, which we can only assume means that they managed to fix the problem here.

Jet Llllaaaaggggg!
After a good 12 hours sleep and a sleeping tablet later we were relatively sufficiently rested to take on a day of shopping. It’s unbelievable what a 10-hour time difference, 24 hours of flying with only 4-5 hours sleep can do to you. During supper on Friday night (your early Saturday morning) I wondered for the first time ever why we’re actually doing this. Sleep deprivation is the worse torture I can think of. Luckily there is nothing 12 hours of good solid sleep can’t sort out.

Shop till you Drop!
Saturday morning we went shopping. Ooo, this is so evil! The things you can buy here are amazing. Not everything is cheaper than SA, but the variety is huge. I’m not even ashamed to say that I didn’t go into all the stores. It’s impossible to go through everything. We just looked at which shops looks good and then let that guide us. What makes it even better is that it’s extremely easy getting around in Vegas. It increases you shopping experience ten fold!

Karen’s Favorite Buys
1. This one was on Kurt’s demand: A beautiful formal blue (between baby and royal blue) coat with white buttons and lining.
2. Two pairs of Tommy Hilfiger Jeans

Kurt’s Favorite Buys
1. Banana Republic Camel Diner Jacket
2. Blue Polo shirt

Some interesting shop and restaurant names:
1. TGI Friday (restaurant) – after the very famous abbreviation TGIF (Thank Goodness It’s Friday)
2. A Pea in the Pod – Shop selling maternity wear

Food for Thought
Typical me, I will always have something to say about food and eating habits. I am amazed, shell-shocked and absolutely disgusted with the eating habits of some of these people. They are some of the friendliest and well mannered people I’ve ever met, but serving doughnuts and apple-crumble (to name a few) at a breakfast buffet is beyond my comprehension. Now you can argue that not everyone indulges in these wonderful desserts (they are called desserts for a reason), but you have to ask yourself why these things are available in the first place. Isn’t it true that they will only serve it if there is a demand for it?

The statistics for America says that 2/3 of the population is overweight. I can see where they get these stats from and I can see why. I’m just wondering how anyone can be foolish enough to believe that it’s good old fruit, vegetables and starches such as potatoes, sweet potatoes and other whole-grains that is the cause of these problems. Look at what is served in the restaurants and you’ll find your answer.

One last thing. We all know these tiny plastic containers filled with 20ml of milk we often find at B&B’s? I couldn’t help but to keep one just to list all the garbage that is in that teeny tiny container.

Ingredients: Water, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, corn syrup solids, sodium caseinate (milk derivate) and mono & diglycerides sodium, Stearoyl-2-lactylate, salt, sodium citrate, disodium phosphate and artificial colours.

NO Milk??? Eewwee!!!

Have a good one!