Viva Las Vegas, Day One or, Adventures in Drunken Blogging.

That's actually not very apt, today, but I'm sure the blogging will turn drunken before the trip ends. Today was totally a travel day, which wasn't exactly how we'd planned it. Things went as well as can be expected with air travel these days - walk 7 - 8 miles through the Atlanta airport, find that your gate is all the way at the end of the concourse and walk 2 more miles, walk a mile back to the bathrooms, etc. However, neither baggage check-in nor security screening had anything like the wait times we'd been warned of; I was delayed longer getting through security by my own fumblings for ID, boarding passes, etc. than I was by the screeners.

We landed in Phoenix and did more hiking, but not as bad as the A-T-L. Our layover in Phoenix was a little under an hour, just enough time for a bathroom break and a Coke, so that worked out well - better for me than a non-stop, really, because it was far cheaper and I have this "thing" about public restrooms - so I far preferred a bathroom break at the airport than *shudder* the airplane toilet. We also surfed on their wireless network, checked e-mail and sent a few text messages.

When we finally got to Vegas, we'd gotten these shuttle transfers as part of our package. It was cheap and the one time I did that, in the Virgin Islands, it worked smooth as glass. This time...er, well, it didn't. It took for-frickin'-EVAH, by which I mean longer, and I am not kidding, to get to the hotel from the airport via this shuttle than the flight from Phoenix to Vegas (which is only 46 minutes). So we FINALLY got to the hotel and they couldn't find our reservation. We had all the paperwork and no one disputed this, but they couldn't find it. Turns out, we foolishly thought that since Alan had booked it and we'd used his credit card to pay, it would be under his name. Nope, 'twas under mine because they'd had me listed first alphabetically, when he input passenger names, only it never occurred to us to give them my name. We figured it out eventually, hiked the 3 miles through the Mandalay Bay lobby and were at last in our room.

I took a quick shower to wash off the travel grime and we relaxed a while in the room, called room service for a snack, chilled a while. One very cool thing - they have an aquarium (shark reef) here at Mandalay Bay and on the television, one of the channels is live reef-cam. You get mesmerized quite easily watching the water flow and the fish swim. Then I realized I'd neglected to pack a necessity so we ran out to Walgreen's, took the tram back and kinda looked around. Matt (the guy who's wedding we're here to attend) called and wanted to hook up but Alan was exhausted. He also figured (quite rightly) that once I got together with Matt and then Bo joined us, there'd be no getting my ass back to the hotel at anything like a decent hour, so we opted to stay in tonight.

Downstairs in one of the several Mandalay Bay shops, I bought a container of orange juice and a small bottle of Absolut, took a hot bath in this h-u-g-e tub with the wonderful sea salts the hotel so thoughtfully provided, and am now blogging. Alan is memorizing maps. Tonight we'll get a good sleep and hit the town tomorrow, free of travel fatigue. Fun will be had!

But not the sort of fun we saw advertised on the drive here - stripper-connection.com, which delivers the stripper of your choice right to your door in twenty minutes. I am not making that up.