Day 27 - The Big Walmart Tour of 2014

In 2009 Allister and I attempted to find a Walmart out of Boston and that ill-fated outing became known as the  ‘Walmart debarcle of 2009’ miles of walking in wooded areas with minimum population before we gave up and conceded defeat.  5 years later victory was mine, the Walmart tour of 2014 came to fruition. We went in search of additional suitcases (to get our purchases home in) and whatever else we thought was too good a deal to pass up. E.g.: I purchased 7 tubes of toothpaste for $3.97each and in Oz it is $10 a tube, that’s the type of saving I’m talking about, see I saved myself $40 just on toothpaste alone. Got to spend it to save it.

Shell and I out front of Walmart - Proof I was there.

We wandered the isles hoping to spot some ‘People of Walmart’ candidates, best I viewed was a lady wearing a pair of black and fluro pink web toed shoes?  Why I asked myself, and I couldn’t come up with an answer.  I was disappointed I didn’t see more candidates as I was expecting see a flurry of Walmartians.

We were ever so happy with our Walmart expedition and I can now say, that is one of my bucket list items crossed off (Clearly I have some pretty low expectations of my bucket list!)

After that we went into a ‘department store’ called Ross. Now I use the term ‘department store’ loosely as it was more just a large shop with merchandise (merch) sort of dumped willy nilly.  But this merch is all last season’s designer gear at a ¼ or less of the original price.  I got a lovely Kenneth Cole handbag for $22. I mean how good is that?

From there we went into a huge scrapbooking store.  Chris and Shell made a couple of tiny purchases, I had a bit of a look and then we all spoke with the lovely lady who owned the store. She called the cab for us so that we could drop our massive bargains back to the hotel so we can start all over again.

We walked from our hotel over to Planet Hollywood, had a bit of a wander through there and then decided to have lunch at Gordon Ramsay’s BurGR restaurant (an upper class burger joint).  The food it’s self was beautiful couldn’t fault it, that is about where the excellence stopped.  The girl who served us was as fake as could be and disinterested like you wouldn’t believe, all the waitresses skirts were barely there (another 5 or 6 inches of fabric wouldn’t have gone astray), the music was WAY too loud, and from the time our order was taken it took about 40 or 45 minutes to get a poxy burger.  The table next to us came in about 15 minutes after we sat down and they had their order in a jiffy, but they were clearly friends with the waitress and had preferential treatment. In summarisation I think Gordon needs to spend a bit of time in this establishment, swear at a few people and crack the whip (and maybe bring some fabric with him to fix up the waitresses skirts while he’s at it).

 

From there we walked down to the Venetian and checked out the canals and took a few photos for memory sake.  It is such a lovely slow tranquil place in the Venetian opposed to the crazy of the strip.  Then we headed to Wynn to pick up our tickets for our show “Le Reve” translated to “The Dream”.  We roughly had an hour and a half to kill before the show so we crossed over the road to the Fashion Show Mall and sniffed out somewhere to have a massage. This was late afternoon and we’d been going since about 8am and we were in need of some rejuvenation.  It is amazing what a half an hour rub down on your back and feet can do to you.  After the massage our spirits perked up and we were ready to soldier on, we came back to life. 

 

The show “Le Reve” is in this wonderful theatre, ever so beautiful. The stage if you want to call it that is a pool and it is in the middle of the theatre. We were in the third row and we even got splashed a little every now and then.  The story itself confused me a little, but who cares just watching the acrobatics, diving, and the entire production was enough to keep me captivated for the 90 minute show.

 

 

After the show we cabbed it back to our hotel and we were firmly planted in our room by 9.30pm for some attempted shut eye.

Day 26.2 - Vegas is broken

Shelley calls us this morning on the phone and says, "have you looked out the window? Vegas is broken"  So we hit the button to open our electronic curtains and this is the view we were graced with from our room:

 

This photo probably doesn't do the view justice.  But quite frankly, the bright lights and the glitz and glamour of the evening lights are gone, during the harsh reality of day, from up above you are faced with a dull grey boring concrete jungle.

Day 26.1 - Shopping outlets and some silly sights

Shopping
After quite a pathetic sleep we got up and jumped in a cab and headed to the North factory outlet (the East factory outlet is about 1/3 of the size of North), so we wanted the big Kahuna of outlets. Neither Shelley or I had cash on us, that's fine, We'll find an ATM at the mall and grab some cash.  Where there was supposed to be ATM's there were either coca cola vending machines or literally a hole in the wall, not an ATM to be found, thank god the shops had their eftpos facilities up and running.

 

 

Chris, modelling her "Breakfast Club" singlet purchase in a shoe shop

We spent the bulk of the day there and then we jumped in a cab back to the hotel around 3.30pm. The taxi driver proceeds tells us that there is an 'Adult Film Expo' on in Vegas at the moment and due to that there are an extra 20,000 people in town.  But last week was the 'Gadget Expo' and I think he said there were 165,000 extra peeps in town for that one.  Thank god we are here during the 'Adult Film Expo' that is 145,000 less people we need to contend with in queues.

So we got back to the hotel and showed off out purchases to each other. Job well done ladies and then it was time to shower and change and head down to the Mandalay Bay to have some dinner and see the Cirque du Soleil Michael Jackson "One" show.  Some of you may be aware that Cirque du Soleil had the Michael Jackson "Immortal" tour going on through Australia towards the end of last year and I didn't hear one good review on it.  In fact Shelley saw Immortal and was so disappointed that she really wasn't keen to see this one. But she took one for the team and agreed to see "One" and she knew within the first few minutes that there was no comparison between the two.  This show was excellent, completely different to their Beatles "Love" show but certainly on par with it.  We were sitting in the second row, while it was a fabulous view of the stage, if anyone was thinking of going to see it, I'd suggest sitting a little back so all the side action and what is going on up in the air above you can be taken in and absorbed to it's full potential. But none the less just a BRILLIANT show, highly recommended.

Selfie taken by the Selfie Extroidinaire Shelley - Heading off the MJ show

 

 

Chris doing her best MJ impersonation

We had cocktails and dinner before the show, we ate at Lupo a Wolfgang Puck restaurant and it was devine.  So far our Vegas experience is working out just as it should be... Perfect.

Some Silly Sights
Granted Vegas is as tacky as all get up, but it's fabulous.  You'll see all sorts of weird and wonderful things.  Today I saw 3 things that I wish to share, unfortunately there is no photo evidence to substantiate, but here they are:

1. An Elvis impersonator on his motorised gopher hooking along down the strip sidewalk (by the time the camera was out, we'd left him in our tracks)

2. Two lonely ladies I'd guess in their 50's having a dance to a band.  Nothing terribly with that scenario.  But plenty wrong with this scenario... One of the ladies was in her purple sequined UGG boots bopping away. Bless.

3. A 2 seater gopher.  A husband and wife sitting side by side on the gopher. I took a rear view photo but it never worked out. 


I'd like to say I've seen it all now, but I suspect there will be more weird and wonderful things tomorrow to feast my eyes on!!

Although, I did see this tiny little sign tucked away in a corner next to an ATM machine. Gambling awareness isn't terribly prevalent in Las Vegas, funny that.....

 

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

Days 23 & 24 – Days 6 & 7 Pirates of the Caribbean Cruise

Friday 10^th January 2014 and Saturday 11th just steaming the high seas headed back to Fort Lauderdale in Florida where we will disembark the ship at sparrows fart on the 12th January so we can make our flights onto Las Vegas.

Amongst other things of doing not much at all, we had 2 all important housekeeping chores to do.

1: HAND WASHING. Now, let me tell you what a drag it is trying to get these lads to hand wash just a few items each of their clothing.  Given how much their Grandma Duplex insists to hand wash I would have thought that the art and love of hand washing would have been in the family genes and come easily, but apparently not.

Our hand washing hanging out to dry

(Check out the towel monkey hanging from the roof, our cabin man used to make us a different animal every second night, we also had a dog, elephant and racoon (we think)) 

 

Hazza drying his shirt with a hair dryer

 

2: PACKING. The next drag is getting these boys to get their back packs squared away.  We have to be off the ship pretty early tomorrow morning so the bulk of our packing has to be done today.  They weren’t being very compliant in their packing obligations, so I sent them out of the cabin and told them to come back in hour.  This is what they returned to:

This is another trick Grandma Duplex used on me back in the day, she would pile all my stuff in my doorway so I had to put it away.  This couch folds out to their bed, so it couldn’t be turned into their bed until the items had been packed away.  I was nice, I even got their packs out from under the bed where they had been stored and popped them on a bench or a bed so they didn’t have to bend too far to make the packing easier for them.

We also gave some activities a go: ice skating, rock climbing and zip lining (although the zip lining is questionable as there is no photo evidence, just Macks word for it and sometimes that word is stretched a little)

 

 

 

 Hazza and I - Another real selfie

 

Day 22 – West Aussies in the West Indies

We docked over night at St. Maarten or St. Martin (depends if you are in the French or Dutch side as to the spelling) in the West Indies.  We had a full day in port so we took our time getting off the ship to avoid the exiting stampede.  It was a funny day weather wise, probably only about 25 or 26 deg’s C, it rained a few times, and was even a bit windy (certainly not on par with Geraldton wind but).

We caught a cab to Muho Beach, more commonly known as ‘Airport Beach’.  Google it, there is heaps about Airport Beach St Martin’s on You Tube. Basically it’s this lovely beach at the start of the runway and there are people everywhere.  We were there around noon, there was this outdoor bar that was packed to the max, there was a reggae band playing and they were excellent. We waited about and watched a few planes land and take off, but we left before the big American Airlines plane came into land - bummer. 

 

 

 

There are so many private jets of all sizes at this airport just parked up waiting in their occupants to fly back out St Maarten after their vacation.  There are also heaps of private luxury yachts dotted about the place.  Supposedly a lot of these people fly in on their private jets to meet up with their luxury yachts.  How the other half live eh?

 

 

We then got dropped off at some Beach Resort (name eludes me), that sits in this protected bay and it’s called Little Beach.  It was protected from the wind, we all plopped down on beach chairs for about 15 minutes for a  little relax, we thought it was going to rain again so we upped digs and sat at the bar.  The adults had a strawberry daiquiri the boys had a soft drink.  As we were talking to the bartender, I noticed him pour the contents of a stubbie into a take away coffee cup, I’d be interested to know how many ‘coffees’ he drinks a day on the job.

 

The coffee swigging bar tender, with my drink in view

The Duplex Men at Little Beach with Nicholas showing off his lovely coconut

 

There had been 5 or 6 huge ships docked when we arrived to port this morning, but after our adventures today there were only 3 left in port when we arrived back to the cruise ship terminal. There must have been 20,000 tourists or more hit the island today, this probably happens on a daily basis.  Back at the terminal there were these two dudes playing a Rihanna song on the Calypso drums, I grabbed a mojito and the boys and I listened to these guys for a bit, they were ultra cool, I even gave them a tip. The mojito was tasty too.

 

One of the calypso drum players, flashing his pearly whites.

 

We board the ship, time to shower and head off for a family dinner, which once again was top notch. I was asleep by about 9.30, Peter and Sue tell me they stayed out til about 1 or 2 am.

Day 21 – Tinkering about in St. Thomas (U.S. Virgin Islands)

Today we were supposed to dock around 11.30am at St. Thomas a lovely island which is one of the US Virgin Islands, but cause of some wind overnight arrival time got put back to 1.30pm.  So upon docking we dis-embarked the ship and organised our transport in this cool taxi thing over to Megans Beach. The ride took us about half hour through rain forest terrain.  It was a lovely drive and I really liked St. Thomas.  Ever so laid back.

 

Beep. Beep.

So we hit Megans Beach and this is the view we were greeted with.  Welcome to the Caribbean. 

(photo's don't do this beach justice, it was just gorgeous, the water was crystal clear) 

 

Old Mate selling his wares (his lovely coconuts) and wielding his machete like no body's business

 

Yes this beach was packed and it cost us $4 each to enter but it really was just beautiful.  It was probably only 25 degrees C and Peter was the only one to have a swim, Sue and I had strawberry Daiquiris in plastic cups instead, they were yummy.

Not a fake selfie.  I've graduated and managed to take a real selfie!!!

Here I am on Megans Beach 

 

Peter was the only one to take a dip in the crystal clear Caribbean waters.

 

Look at Nick - Too cool for school in his sunnies

 

We caught another one of those cool taxi’s back to the ship, this return trip took a little longer due to ‘peak hour’ traffic on the island.  When we got back to the cruise ship terminal it was about 5pm and pitch dark.  The boys went back on board and the adults roamed the terminal shops.  I bought a replacement nighty for the one left behind at the Hyatt NYC, some fridge magnets and a bling bling dress ring and a pair of stud ear rings.

Shower, dinner and another early night.  I have never slept so well in my life as I have slept on this ship.  I reckon I’ve caught up on a decade of crap sleep since I’ve been on this ship, it’s just brilliant.