Monday, February 14th, 2000 (Valentine's Day)

NOTE: ALL OF OUR HONEYMOON PICTURES ARE NOW ON FLICKR, WHERE YOU CAN LEAVE COMMENTS!
Please view them HERE instead.
You may have to scroll down a bit to get to the first honeymoon pics. Note that they are in reverse order.

Monday we woke up at 8AM-ish, ready to see the city during the day. We wanted to rent a car -- eventually -- so we tried to find Rent-A-Wreck based on the verbal directions from the front desk attendant at our hotel (Villa Roma).

We got a gist of the direction to walk and decided to walk to the Hilton -- because there was this HUGE sign that we could just walk directly towards.

But there were these really REALLY annoying fences "protecting" huge, empty parking lots. It made no sense. We had to do about twice the walking necessary, it really sucked. We learned to walk on the sidewalks and not try shortcuts after that. Vegas is the master city of processing huge numbers of people, and this was just one more way to "process" us into not walking through back alleys, parking lots, etc. Argh.

huge Hilton sign that must be 20 stories tall. Apparantly there used to be a bigger one, but it fell down, probably killing someone.

Once we arrived at the Hilton, we decided to do The Star Trek Experience.



It consisted of an extremely intricate Star Trek museum that took a good 30 minutes of walking through just to see everything.

Following that, you go to the "ride" part of the "experience". We were "teleported" from one room to another -- it was actually a pretty cool effect, because there was a flash followed by a second of total darkness, and the screens you were just watching, and the wall they were on, are no longer there. And you're on a bridge. It was actually disconcerting.

The ride itself was one of those rooms where everyone sits down, straps on their seatbelt, and the whole room moves around while you watch the front screen. Clint felt a bit sick from it. We both enjoyed the whole experience though.

After the ride, we were released into the gift shop/restaurant/bar/casino area of The Star Trek Experience.

We got our Borg pictures taken there:

Klingon: I've got a joke. Two dead Ferrengi are in a box. <prolonged laughter>
This guy was a full-time Klingon. How odd.

After that, we got some pizza and noticed we were by an elevator. We rode up it and it turned out to be a 30-floor glass elevator, the only free ride in Vegas.

view from 30th floor, glass elevator, outside edge of the Hilton

after leaving, we tried to take a picture of the cool mountains in the background, but they didn't come out too well

Then we looked for Rent-A-Wreck in a phone book we found. We saw that it was near The Stratosphere so we walked towards that -- you can see it from anywhere in Vegas so it makes a great navigation point, especially if it is close to what you are looking for.

view from the base of the Stratosphere, straight up

Once we got into the Stratosphere, we gambled a bit. We also shopped around at the gift stores and bought our first of many shotglasses...

There were lots of these color gradient-type shotglasses custom made for different hotel/casinos. We're partial to purple so this was the only one we got.

We also got this one, because of its fluorescent properties. Glows very intensely under a blacklight.

After shopping for awhile we decided we needed to ascend the tower. So we paid for the ticket to the so-called "Virtual Reality & Tower Admission" to go to the top (108th floor).

view from the Stratosphere's 108th floor observation area

We tried to find Villa Roma (our hotel) with the telescope, but it was obscured by The Riviera.
Someone somewhere was getting busted by the cops.

more 108th floor

While we were up on the 108th floor, we played a virtual reality game that they just so happened to have up there, a lot like Quake. Carolyn kicked Clint's ass 5 to 3. (Carolyn was Luke Skywalker, Clint was Darth Vader).

As with most virtual reality games, it was very disorientating to "awaken" back into normal reality, especially since the sun had set while we were "elsewhere".

We checked out the outdoor observation deck, complete with 70mph winds. Standing that high up in such high winds was a bit freaky. Carolyn did not want to let go of the building railing.

Clint commented on the fact that even if you fell over the main fence, there was another platform about 5 feet long and 5 feet below that also had a second fence -- so it would be hard to fall. Then some pepole right next to us talked about how some 22-year-old had jumped off the week before.

Since we had spent a decent amount of the actual sunset in virtual reality, it seemed to suddenly have gotten very dark. You could see how the whole city had lit up, especially from the 108th floor. It was a really cool transition. Too bad we didn't get to see some of the city lights come on since most came on while we were in virtual reality.

Finally, we left the Stratosphere, and headed towards Rent-A-Wreck...

the sun set while we were up at floor 108. The Statosphere has a cool color-changing lightshow projected on the upper part of the tower that you can see for miles.

Damn! Rent-A-Wreck had closed. We were too easily distracted and too busy having fun at the Hilton and the Stratosphere to bother getting to Rent-A-Wreck before they closed. No matter. There was plenty of stuff to do on the way home. However, Clint hadn't listened to Carolyn about it possibly being cold, and it was very windy.

First we stopped at the "World's Largest Gift Shop" and looked around at the hugest collection of useless stuff I've ever seen. There was a cool Vegas poster that was an arial picture of the city. But it had better pictures of the landmarks superimposed over the original shot -- thus looking much cooler. We bought it later as an afterthought while waiting at Rent-A-Wreck for the shuttle back to the airport (when we finally left Vegas).

so-called "World's Largest Gift Shop" where we got our cool Vegas poster

At this point we were actually quite tired from all the walking, so we only made one stop on the way home. We went to the Riviera and gambled a little, which we'd actually been doing everywhere we went the whole time anyway. We ended up crashing real early, like midnight (3AM EST).

Click here to go to the next page and see what we did Tuesday...

Click here to see our Vegas postcards...
Click here to see our Vegas shotglasses...
Click here to see our Borg Pics...

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