Day 25 - Vegas, here we come

Today I had to wake the boys up at 5.15am, I was not popular.  We had to get our last buffet breakfast fill and then depart the ship. If your flight is before noon (our was at 11.36am), the ship suggests you take the 'self leave' option.  Which quite frankly is - you take your own luggage off the ship between 6.45am and 7.30am, window of opportunity we thought we best take to be on the safe side to meet our flight.  So not only did I wheel my own luggage on, I also wheeled it off.  Well, I use the term I wheeled it off myself very loosely as my nephews were 'hands free' due to their lugging of backpacks and I was helped with my luggage wheeling by them.

We got to the airport at about 7.40am, so four hours to kill.  We sat about and hooked all our devices upto wifi and connected to the world again.  Once again security check was interesting.  For some reason Peter and Sue got ushered through the quick queue, the boys and I weren't allowed to join them, why I'll never know?  So I think we were in the queue for about half hour or so.

When we got to the first guy who checks the passport and boarding pass, Mack went through and said "Cheers" as the guy was letting him through.  Next was my turn and I said "Cheers" as well.  Next thing I heard the guy muttering "cheese" a few times to himself and then he looked at me and said "did you just cheese to me?" 
"No, we were saying cheers" we replied, you get the gist, the conversation went on about a cheese and cheers for a bit.  Although the scene in Kath and Kim about the "Little baby cheeses (Jesus)" did pop to mind.

Then we got held up through the scanning process due to 1 boy (no need to put your name out to the universe, you know who you are) leaving a half full water bottle in his day pack.  Yep, that got confiscated.  Onto our gate to catch our United Airlines flight to Vegas via Houston.

Houston was quite a bumpy flight and hard landing, we were supposed to have an hour transit but turned out to be more like 2 hours as the plane we were to get on next was late arriving, so it gave us a bit of grace for a relaxed toilet stop and a bite of lunch.

Next flight to Vegas was a smooth landing but quite bumpy in the air. Touch down we do and Peter and Susan were quite amazed to see pokies at the airport!! Welcome to Vegas baby!!  The airport has certainly been upgraded since I was here in 2009, she is very flashola now.  Our bus driver was there to pick us up, the family was dropped at the hotel next door to mine the "Monte Carlo" and then I was dropped at "Aria".  On trip advisor there are always complaints about the queues and how long it takes to book into these hotels. At 5.50pm (and it's pitch dark mind you), there was no queue, imagine my surprise as almost everywhere I've been in America is queue after queue? I was in like Flynn.

The girls arrived at the hotel around 9pm so we just ducked down to the closest eatery to our lift that we could find and grabbed some dinner. 

View from our hotel room