What I'm Not Going To Tell You About Vegas

Sorry everyone but I've got a few more things to share about Vegas. Actually I have not even touched on the whole reason why we went to Vegas so I'm going to do that now. Lee, since you live in Vegas you have my permission to totally skip this one.

You're welcome.


We stayed at the Venetian because that is where Wine Spectator hosted their 2009 Grand Tour and yes, we got to go!



Over 200 wineries were there to pour one of their best wines. When you enter the banquet room, you are given a Wine Spectator Wine Glass and Guide listing all the wineries and wines being served with areas for your tasting notes.

So you basically go around to the different booths and taste their wines. Every booth had a representative from its winery and usually one or two buckets for you to spit or dump wine from your glass. If you don't like the wine, you don't wanna dump the wine in front of the wine maker, that's just rude. I would go to the next wine maker and dump it in their bucket so they could then refill my glass.

At first we did a lot of dumping but later, we did find some yummy ones! All the French Bordeaux's were the highlight of the night for me. The most popular wines were so crowded because everyone wanted to taste them. Everyone was dressed up and there was a buffet to pair your wines with food. The food was lacking and so was the seating but we had eaten dinner before we went so it wasn't too bad for us. I just wish we would have stayed longer because there were so many wines we didn't taste.

And one suggestion for anyone that is going to go to a huge wine tasting like that is to learn about the wines that will be poured before you go. After the tasting, I was looking at the guide with all the different wines and I missed a ton of good ones that I would have liked to try. And I heard later that some of the wineries actually ran out of wine before the night was over so you definitely want to visit your favorites first!

Thanks Mom- and Dad-in-law for taking Alex and I, it was definitely a learning experience for me and we both loved it!



Now I mentioned that we got a Wine Spectator Wine glass from the tasting right? Well the minute we stepped out of the banquet area, Alex just about threw his in the trash! I about died, hello? We get to keep the glasses! I stopped him from throwing it away but at the time, I didn't know what pain they would be taking home!

Those stupid wine glasses did not want to make it back to Utah. I carefully packed them in our M&M bag and stuffed them with tissues so they wouldn't bang around. When they had to go through on the security belt to make sure they weren't laced with arsenic or something, they somehow fell out of the bag in the process.

I was standing on the other side of the belt waiting from them to come out and I hear this clanking sound while they both came rolling out falling into the crease between the belts. I about died for the second time. Luckily I yelled at the airport lady and she stopped the belt just in time and was able to save the glasses before they broke.

Then when the belt started up again, out came all the tissue I had used to stuff the bag. It looked like crumpled up toilet paper and I had stuffed so many freakin tissues in that damn bag and now they were falling all over everyone's stuff. I finally gave up trying to gather them all and just grabbed my glasses and left.

So they finally made it home and I put them in the dishwasher and this is how they looked after coming out:



Clean? Yes. Clear? Yes, but that's the problem. The whole reason I wanted to keep the glasses was because they had a frosted Wine Spectator logo on them so we could keep them as a souvenir, but no. All that trouble to get them home and they are now like any other wine glass, no logo remains at all.

Fricken A! Oh well, now we have 2 miss matched wine glasses that are now out of place but whatever, maybe I'll just write "Wine Spectator Grand Tour 2009" on them with magic marker.

Yep, that's what I'll do. It'll all be worth it now.



Okay, check this out, I actually got the guys to pose for the camera. This doesn't happen very often and maybe it was just because the guys couldn't give up the opportunity to stand next to the life size blue men group, but I'm glad it happened!








This was our last day when we left Bert and Ernie to gamble, I mean Alex and Terry, while we went to look at the lions and dolphins.







And below we have a statue, not a human being. A statue.



Okay, you caught me. It's a human being pretending to be a statue. The way it works is that people will give the statue lady money and then pose with her for a picture.



Well, we didn't realize that you could stand up by the statue to pose after giving her a tip. So Cris went to tip the statue and the statue kept moving her fingers telling us come up and take a picture. Well we thought she was really saying to give her a bigger tip.

Look at the statue's face in the next pic when she realized we thought she was just being greedy:



It was probably my fault because I kept laughing yelling, "Oh, she wants more money!" People probably thought we were pretty dumb, but whatever. They can suck it.


So that's it for Vegas, here we are headin to the airport in the limo. I thought they were blog worthy pictures. And I am not going to write about how Cris tripped while getting into the limo and totally fell flat on her face. I would never tell an embarrassing story like that about anybody else but me.

Never.