Day 28 - Scrapped Neon Signs

First up today before the crack of dawn, Shelley was being picked up by her limo to take her to the helicopter terminal, she was doing an early morning chopper ride to the Grand Canyon to see the sun rise.  She was delighted she did it as she wasn’t too sure, but when we saw her after her tour she said something like “That is one of the best things I’ve done in my life”. So she was very happy with herself, and we were happy for her.

We then piled into a cab and headed to the Neon Sign Boneyard. This is where most of the retired signs go to die.  Liisa Rose was our tour guide, she was a little bit painful if I’m honest.  It was only us 3 and a lovely older couple from Utah on the tour.  Now Liisa needs to know how to read her audience, she pretty much lost us right from the get go.  Just like a comedienne when they know when they are tanking and  they have to work out a way to win their audience back, Liisa had to try and win us back, but she didn’t succeed, clearly we are a tough crowd to please.  Sure, there were some interesting facts which captivated us for a moment or two here and there but really, that’s where the captivation ended.

 

 

 

 

 After that we went for a wander along the Freemont Street Experience which is the original Vegas Strip. By day not much to see other than seedy men and people begging for money.  From what I’ve read and heard it comes alive at night and is quite the family destination.  Seedy v Family Fun – Only in Vegas.  We had lunch at Denny’s Diner which was more than adequate and the waitresses at Gordon Ramsay’s BurGR restaurant could have taken a leaf out of Kaz’s book.  She was our older career waitress who was excellent (I’d say Kaz was a hip and happening, young at heart 48 year old).

 At the end of Freemont Street we stumbled across the ‘Heart Attack Diner” If you are over 350lbs, you eat for free.  Terrible concept but must be popular as there were plenty of people (mostly men) in there at 1.30pm on a Wednesday.  Everyone who dines there has to wear a surgical gown, if you are drinking a shot it’s issued in a syringe to your mouth and if you are having a larger sized drink apparently it is distributed to you by your very own IV drip (but no, it’s not an IV drip in the literal sense, somehow the liquid is dispersed into your mouth). Crazy.

 

 

See, all these guys in here have their surgical robes on, just in case

 

 

We then sought out the Mob Museum and walked Shell there, there was no way we were letting her out of our sights in this area of town. Once the museum was located Chris and I caught a taxi back to the Fashion Show Mall for a couple of hours.  If I’m honest I was only going back there to indulge in another massage, but I got caught up in the leisurely wandering of the shops and the massage ended up eluding me.

Our next show “Menopause, the Musical” was at 5.30pm at Luxor, so at 4.45pm we cabbed it back to the hotel to drop our bags and meet up with Shell so we can head off to the show.

 Couple of indications that “Menopause the Musical” is a low end production.

1.      It’s on at 5.30 in the afternoon

2.      The cast move their own props about on the darkened stage

Why you may ask would you see this production? (We asked ourselves the very same question), none of us could sit through the pain of a Celine Dion show, Brittney wasn’t on for the month of January, and quite frankly there wasn’t much else to choose from, so Menopause it was.  Look, we got some great laughs out of it, they were all songs we knew and the lyrics had been re-worked to explain the trials and tribulations of ‘the change’ and all things unfair about being a female. There were 4 main female characters, there was one black lady in the cast who I’d say was the lead, she was just brilliant and could belt out a tune like no-body’s business, two others came a close second to her and the last woman in the cast, well - she just annoyed each of us.  Poor Chris had a woman sitting next to her who we think nearly wet herself from laughing so much from curtain up to curtain down.  And then there was the group of 6 or 7 non English speaking people sitting in the row behind us.   We think that one person could speak English and was translating to the rest of their peeps as to what was happening on stage. Really it was very annoying of these people and took away a tiny bit of the lustre from an already so-so production.  But hey, it gave us something to talk about in our show post mortem.

One thing we have found in every show we’ve seen, there has always been one person (usually female) that has just annoyed us.  We relate this one annoying character to a girl we went to school with, I did refer to her in a post I entered from Ney York when Shelley and I saw the ‘Kinky Boots’ show,

We cabbed it back to our hotel, grabbed some dinner in a café and were back in our rooms by 8.30pm, showering, packing and just getting ready for the 9am flight in the morning to Honolulu.

 In Vegas we:

            Didn’t go to one club

            Didn’t have one bet

            Didn’t see a full show of the Bellagio fountains

            Didn’t have a great sleep

            Only had one cocktail each the entire time

            Still managed to have a truly fabulous time

 

Well done girls, well done.