After the Grapevine Canyon Petroglyphs it is time to drive to Las Vegas and after checking in the first order of business is to find something for dinner. We settle for a nearby restaurant and order takeout as it is quite full and our room has a nice table where we can eat.
And the table, as well as the room obviously, has some great views of the Las Vegas Strip. While we do not stay right on the Strip the views are great and we enjoy them with our dinner before going to sleep.
As we wake up in the morning we start the day enjoying the great views of the Strip now, in the daylight. We are also trying to plan our route as we want to see as much as we can during this day that we will spend in Vegas.
The first casino we visit is Bellagio. We do not plan to gamble but to see the attractions that they built in the hotels to bring in tourists. The hotels themselves are quite luxurious looking with a lot of attention to detail.
One of the attractions that we wanted to see inside the Bellagio is the Bellagio Conservatory and Botanical Garden. It is an interesting place with some beautiful floral arrangements that change regularly.
We are especially impressed by the painting reproduced using only flowers, it is something special. The crane made out of flowers is quite interesting also and we wander around for some time admiring the different arrangements.
But soon we are tired so what better place to relax than looking at the chocolate fountain and buying some sweets and a coffee?
We continue exploring the Strip passing and entering briefly quite a few other casinos. All of them are very impressive from the outside but do not always have inside interesting attractions besides the casino.
There are a lot of people everywhere, it is probably the closest you can get the hustle and bustle of a European city in the US with the exception maybe of downtown New York. Of course here most people are tourists….
The other casino that we really wanted to visit is the Flamingo Hotel Casino. It has some cute fake flamingoes in front but we are here for the ones hidden inside the bowels of the huge complex. There are quite a few of them in the gardens and we explore them thoroughly to see what else we can find.
How about a waterfall? Found. Guinea fowl? Found. Other interesting birds? Also found and we are not even sure how many are kept captive and how many are visiting just for the free food.
What surprises us is that the casinoes while reasonably full always seem comparatively empty vs. the shopping and entertainment areas. This is probably due to the fact that it is midday but still we find it interesting.
We continue exploring up and down the Strip searching for a place to eat that is not wait list only or has an hour long queue in front of it. We mostly settle for snacks as we make our way back to the hotel.
We finally settle on a restaurant and even buy some sweets to take to the hotel room as a late evening pick me up. And then we sit back enjoy the view and drift off to sleep.
