Best Vegas Photo

Here's a photo I took at the Venetian hotel (obviously) at sunset. Given that I was so tired I could scarcely hold the camera and my feet hurt so much I couldn't stand long enough to take a few shots, this is a pretty darn good shot.

(no subject)

Wow. Where to begin.

We got up on Saturday at 4:15 in the morning to catch our early flight to Vegas. We got to he hotel too early to check in, so we agreed to go on a side trip for a timeshare presentation. We didn't buy anything, but we did get Mystere tickets for Sunday night. We already had O tickets, so the weekend was shaping up to be Cirque heavy.

We got back from that, checked in to our pyramid room at the Luxor, then napped and ate. The pyramid room does need some description: the Luxor's main building is a pyramid that is the size of the Great Pyramid. It is completely open in the middle; there's one row of rooms around each floor of the pyramid, which does make for some interesting design challenges. For example, rooms on the 21st floor have only a shower, no bathtub. That and the elevators also go diagonally (sometimes with an odd banging sound as the floors go by), so that's a bit weird. Overall, though, the hotel's pretty cool, though I wish they still had the barq rides. Oh well.

We'd come for the last weekend of the Star Trek Experience, so after a brief nap and some food, we headed over to the Star Trek Experience, with a stop along the way at the Mystere ticket office (which took an hour).

Because we got to STE so late, they said our tickets would also be valid the next day. Yay. So we went, and then left just late enough to take a cab to get to the O box office before the show.

While we were at STE, a couple asked a friend to take their picture with the female Klingon, and the woman taking the picture didn't know how to use the camera. The Klingon, getting a bit impatient, said (very friendly, for a Klingon):

"Human. Learn to use the device."

Still cracks me up.

O. Amazing show. I didn't care for it quite as much as Ka, which has more of a narrative structure, but it's amazing. Unfortunately, one of the acts I had known about and been looking forward to was the Washington Trapeze, and that was not one of the acts performed. Here's the O artist performing a part of her act for a TV show:

My favorite was the Russian Swing, I think:

So we walked to the Luxor after that and slept like the dead we were. In the morning, we did a lot of walking around, then went back to STE where, guess what?

Right. They said they couldn't accept the tickets and there'd been a policy change. WTF? Since the day before? On the next-to-last day of the exhibit's run?

I whined enough that they did finally let us in, and we got to go back and do more rides and fun things, plus got to see Chase Masterson again (I'd been the head of programming for BayCon when she was a special guest; she's a real sweetheart, and will be at Silicon this year). We left early enough to book over to the Mystere box office and see that show. Some people have said it's dated, and it is, but it's dated in staging, not in performance. This was the first permanent Cirque show, and they hadn't learned how to think with the permanent staging as well as they had for Ka and O. On the other hand, they probably had budget limitations they didn't have for those later shows.

I'd still recommend Mystere, but if you can swing O or Ka, they're imho better shows. For Mystere, sitting in the first or second row behind the main aisle is better than sitting in one of the last rows in front of it; you'll see more and possibly save a few $.