Birthday Bash, Vegas Style!

Weeks later I'm finally able to sit down and write about our Vegas vacation... Mark's daughter Jintelle turned 21 in March and as we'd promised, we took her and her boyfriend Erik to Vegas to celebrate the event appropriately. We stayed at a condo not even a block off the Strip, which was pretty awesome, and quite honestly a lot cheaper than staying at one of the big casinos. The first day we were there was St. Patrick's Day, which happens to be Jintelle's actual birthday, and let's just say that having your 21st birthday on St. Patrick's Day in Las Vegas is about as awesome a birthday as you could ask for! It started off with a healthy amount of alcohol... and besides having a blast watching all the people walk down the Strip in various green get-ups, I don't recall a whole lot of the night. It was awesome.

Starting things off right!

Telley and me in front of the Excalibur.

This could have been part of the reason why the night was a bit blurry.

It's not a proper trip to Vegas without a Cirque du Soleil show, and this time we saw the newest one at the ARIA, called Zarkana. Compared to all the Cirque du Soleil shows we've seen (which is several), this one wasn't my absolute favorite, but Jintelle and Erik hadn't ever seen Cirque live so this was a real treat for them. And it's always a good night when you see Cirque du Soleil.

We tried to convince Mark to get the Zarkana ringmaster's hat - he should have.

Lovely young couple.

We look pretty good too.

We saw the fountains at the Bellagio, which, come one, everybody has to watch the fountains at the Bellagio while in Vegas. The song they played was "Time to Say Goodbye" by Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman - can you say chills up your spine?

Jintelle also conquered her massive fear of heights and jumped off the Stratosphere. I am SO proud of her - getting anyone to step off a platform and fall straight down for 855 feet is hard enough, but for her, this was big! Mark had already done it a couple years ago and Erik and I were plenty happy to sit back and be cowardly chickens. I'll own it, no problem!

Getting suited up.

We were all a teensy bit worried she wouldn't be able to do it.

She proved us wrong! Yay Telley!

One of the best parts of the trip was this little restaurant on Fremont Street called the Heart Attack Grill. We'd never heard of it before but this place is hilarious!

If you weight 350 pounds or more, you eat for free, and there's a scale outside the restaurant for you to step on to make sure. (Not pictured: vintage ambulance.)

 You have to wear a hospital gown to eat, and they give you wristbands to wear.

The Bypass is what they call their burgers. The Single Bypass is a single hamburger patty, the Double Bypass is two patties and so on up to the Octo Bypass - which you can get with 40 slices of bacon. And in case you weren't sure, everything on their menu is purposefully unhealthy. Besides a Bypass burger and french fries, your only other food option is a ginormous hot dog onto which they dump piles of chili and cheese.

Their decor was awesome. You can't really read it but you could get your alcohol served to you in a prescription bottle. And speaking of alcohol, our Jello shots were administered by our nurse waitress in 60 cc syringes, and our wine came to us in an IV bag. (Actually, to be technical, it's a tube feeding bag, but close enough.)

Poor Telley had had too much to drink the night before so her shot didn't sit so well.

The doctor and nurse getting our IV wine set up.

If they could just invent something like this for caffeine, we'd be good to go!

Quick! More vodka, stat!

Erik on the fast track to wine consumption.

Here was the best part:

If you don't eat all of your burger, your nurse spanks you! At first we thought it would be a light little tapping, but these girls don't mess around! This poor guy at the table next to us had the misfortune of not finishing his meal and this is what he got.

And yes, that is a midget. You can't make this stuff up, people!

Mark had been planning on not quite finishing his burger on purpose just so he could have the experience of getting spanked by a naughty nurse (let me clarify that that is NOT part of my job description) but after seeing that he decided that maybe he didn't want to be punished after all. So we were all determined to finish our burgers - which were big.

It was one of the best burgers I've ever had though. We all managed to eat our burgers when our nurse came back to the table, looked at Mark's plate, and noted in a disappointed tone that he'd eaten all his food.

So the rest of us dumped our leftover fries onto Mark's plate.

Okay, so maybe it was a bit underhanded, but come on, we couldn't pass up this opportunity!

And yes, he got spanked HARD.

Here's the view from the webcam they have set up to get the expressions of the unfortunate spankees.
Mark Gets Spanked

Mark complained for a couple hours afterwards that he couldn't sit down and he was actually worried the skin was broken. But he forgave his nurse anyway. (She did feel bad - she told him afterwards that she doesn't usually hit that hard but her first hit was exceptionally hard and then she couldn't let the rest of them be any less so she had to keep it up.)

And then we got the bill.

So. Freaking. Hilarious! We are definitely going to have to go back on our next trip down.

We walked through the Rio one day, and although we didn't get the chance to see the real Chippendale's dancers we got the next best thing.

Another fun activity we did was go on a zipline tour in Bootleg Canyon, about 30 minutes out of Vegas. It was a nerve-wracking bus drive up a narrow, steep, windy road, followed by a short hike, followed by 4 ziplines down to the bottom, the shortest of which was a quarter mile in length. It was so much fun and on a couple of the ziplines we got going over 60 mph.

We also went to see Tournament of Kings again, since Jintelle and Erik hadn't seen it before, and on our last evening Jintelle and Erik went to Madame Tussaud's while Mark and I had a date night at a restaurant called Japonais, one of those restaurants where a tiny slab of fish costs $20, but it was excellent food.

Plus I enjoy the opportunity to get dressed up.

It was such a fun vacation but, as always, too short. But even though it was nice to get a break from parenting, I was definitely ready to see Mira again by the time we got back. Mira got to spend a few days with her Grandma and a few days with her Grandpa and it sounds like everyone had a great time. And that's a big relief for me to know that Mira spent several days without Mark and me and she wasn't upset about it at all - the most worrisome part of the trip was wondering if she'd be okay and if she would miss us too much or get homesick or something. Apparently Mira was ready for a vacation from Mommy and Daddy too so that worked out for everyone!

I will dedicate the next post to Mark and his job situation. Don't worry, it's not bad, but what happens in Vegas, gets its own blog post. :)