He kept saying we were going to a "tappas restaurant" but I was hearing "topless restaurant"...

[merimask]

First things first... I know I'm jumping the gun here but I want to send a big HAPPY BIRTHDAY to rumdiculous, who is a sweetheart and deserves to have nice things happen to her all day on Sunday. :-) (I'm makin' something extra-special for you...it'll be a bit late but it's coming soon! Shock and awe, baby.)

*ahem*

I FINALLY got around to loading the pictures from my trip to Vegas last weekend. Damn, they're pretty. :-) Makes me want to shove mini marshmallows into my Nikon Coolpix 5200 ('cept, that probably would be a bad thing to do).

So, pictures.
The setup: My brother John lives in Vegas (awesomly cute house in Henderson). Mom visits him there frequently. She was there for a 3 week visit. He'd decided to surprise her, so he flew me, my daughter Charlotte, and my sister Nancy out to Vegas for a weekend. She was indeed surprised! :-)

We got off the plane from Buffalo, ambushed Mom and the rest of the family in the Luxor, and headed straight to the Bellagio to look at the fountain show.

I cried, it was so damn pretty. It's hard to explain, but it's like a ballet of water, set to classical music.
Inside the Bellagio is an incredible display of art.

Dale Chihuly did an amazing ceiling of glass flowers, and also these giant poppies that just glowed in the sunlight. Here's my brother John and Charlotte, digging on the giant glass flowers.

Back outside...looking across the expanse of the fountain pool at "Paris".


Next day! We drove to Lake Mead (which is an improbable manmade oasis in the midst of the desert)and the Hoover Dam, which makes it all possible.

I took about a gazillion pictures...but I'll spare you the fun. :-) There was the most beautiful dedication memorial, though, that featured these gigantic awesome Art Deco angels...

So many people have touched the feet (It's supposed to be good luck or something) that their toes are a bright polished brassy gold. Did I touch the angel's foot? *hangs head sheepishly* Yeah. I was a big stoopid "magical thinker" that day. At the same memorial there was a display of all the astrological signs...

Yeah, I'm a Scorpio. Go figger!
John and Char, posing outside the Hoover Dam gift shop (one of 'em, anyway). John's mantastic!


Last day (aww!). We went on a tour of the desert to the west of Vegas (I think). The Sierra Nevada mountains were simply spectacular.


The mountains made me freaking cry too. 'Course, it didn't help when John put in a CD of Pavarotti singing "Ave Maria". I call "no fair". I could wake up every day and see these, and never tire of the view.

Just a note; The flipping mountains looked almost exactly like the mountains in "Shadow Of The Collossus", a game that's been evading completion for a while now. Seeing them made me remember the good old days when I was riding my horse across the landscape, looking for another innocent giant to kill slowly with pain...
Anyway! For levity (and John's all about the levity...he's the funniest person I know) we went to an "Old West" town. Combination dude ranch/petting zoo/amusement park. Charlotte and John, in a blackmail photo op...

Don't you think Charlotte has a sort of dapper "KD Lang" quality about her? John of course is just fine with the cross dressing...you should have seen him in the stage production of "Rocky Horror Picture Show", he was Faaabulous!

There are wild burros in the desert!

We saw about a dozen of the little guys running around, right by the side of the road. There are wild horses too, apparently (didn't see any of those).
At a scenic overlook, we stopped for family pictures. My sister Nancy, brother John, and myself. Youngest to oldest.

And some candid shots:



This is the last pic we took before we left for our flight back to Buffalo. I wanted a nice one of Nancy and me, together, so I asked John to take it.



Wahh! I need to get back there as soon as possible. All the bright sunlight and family love was good for my soul. :-)

Comments

[zipis1.livejournal.com]

Gasp! You look almost exactly like someone I used to work with! She was my "work mommy", since I was oftentimes mad at my own XD

You know...it's funny. I only live 4-5 hours away from Las Vegas, yet I've never been. I might get to go next year for a vet convention, but it still seems a shame that I've yet to go.. But at least I know that mountains don't look all that different! I <3 west coast mountains. :P

[merimask.livejournal.com]

People keep telling me I look like someone they know...I dunno! Maybe I'm part of a vast genetic experiment. ;-)

I'm not used to seeing all that open space (been brought up on the East coast) and so it's unbelieveably beautiful to me. I've seen the Rockies too...but the Sierra Nevadas look especially colorful and alien.

[zipis1.livejournal.com]

Mmm...I love the open space. I'd die without it (child o' nature, I is :P)

My hometown's one o' the last large, more open spaced places left in CA before you hit Valencia/LA, then it gets harder to find. But from what I can see of Vegas (especially in that 2nd to last pic), the two states look almost identical. Only...I can somehow sense that Vegas is hotter XD

[lotus-faerie.livejournal.com]

Charlotte has your hair. :) Beautiful pictures, and I'm really glad you had a great time.

[merimask.livejournal.com]

Thank you. :-) We all had a blast. MUST go back there soon!

[empath-eia.livejournal.com]

Eee! So pretty! The mountains look a lot like the ones outside my window, actually.

Osoyoos.

All the yellow stuff is desert, the green is irrigated land.

Your daughter has old-soul eyes. She's beautiful. As are you! Yay for pictures of Meri! XD

[merimask.livejournal.com]

Oooo! Your mountains are lovely too. It sort of looks like that around Lake Mead, because of all the water.

I just love mountains. The area I live in is pretty (with Lake Erie being practically down the street and Lake Ontario just a few miles away) but it's SO flat here. Flat flat flat.

[pzb.livejournal.com]

*sigh*....I used to live four hours from there..... (been battling the homesickness bug for a couple weeks now.... *sniff* :D) It's funny to hear the perspective of someone who doesn't live among that type of landscape.....I ot bored of the void of color, but it puts into perspective that people see things differently when they're not constantly surrounded by it.

Don't mind my rambling train of thought this morning.... XD

[zipis1.livejournal.com]

I agree. I was kinda puzzled when Meri started swooning over them. I guess we just start taking the things we're around for granted after a while, eh?

..though...now I can't help but wonder what the landscape around NY is like...*is a l00z3r whose never been*

[pzb.livejournal.com]

lol, neither have I, though I did recently move to Oregon, so I'm much more appreciative of the whole statement "It's GREEN!!!" XD Growing up in a desert, you don't understand that phrase until you're in the middle of it. :D

btw, brilliant icon. XD

[zipis1.livejournal.com]

OMG you mean green exists! Le gasp! I thought it was just a myth! :P

Heehee. Thank you. I rather like it mahself, yessiree Ah do. :P

[merimask.livejournal.com]

It's VERY green here (unless we're experiencing winter...in which case everything looks like a black n white photo). This is a pic of the Erie Canal that I took last summer...Char and I ride our bikes up and down the trail alongside the canal almost every day, as long as the weather is nice. Erie canal.

[zipis1.livejournal.com]

Oh my God! I didn't knoww the world could be that green! O_O

I'm just...I...wow. Spechless. *faint*

[merimask.livejournal.com]

The mountains are such a novelty for me (I live in a very flat place, like I was just telling Empatheia up there) that I find them breathtaking. Plus, all that open, people-less space! Amazing! The East coast is so crammed with cities and people that it's hard to imagine there are parts of the country that are SO unpopulated that they're still wild. :-)

[pzb.livejournal.com]

Yeah, desert land like that around Vegas is a novelity as well. Going back toward LA, once you hit Victorville, forget it....nothing but city from Valencia to the border. XD So I do understand that part of the appeal. :D

[golden-meliades.livejournal.com]

Charlotte looks cute in pigtails. And your cam seems to take very nice, clear, detailed pics.

[merimask.livejournal.com]

Thank you. :-) I love that camera. My husband bought it for me last year, so I could use it to take really good pictures of my work. Of course, now we use it for everything. Char also took a 5 minute movie of the fountains at the Bellagio with it and the quality is incredible.

[chickenpantz.livejournal.com]

Yay!!! I forgot how much I love your blogs!! Yesh! That was so much damn fun! Thanks for posting the pics thither! I might send some of my friends here to see what I've been trying to explain... some writer I am, eh?
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxox
yer thither,
Nantz

[merimask.livejournal.com]

Hee! I had SO much fun there. We have to get back there sometime and really explore those mountains (next time, I'm going to that ranch dressed to ride horses! Sandals in the desert...what the smurf was I thinking??).

Glad you like the pics. *smooch* (seester lurv)

[rumdiculous.livejournal.com]

Those poppies are huge!! I kind of have to wonder about myself, when the first thing I think when I saw those was, "Could someone climb those?"

The Hoover Dam...did you get some Dam Bait? oh god shoot me, the puns haven't stopped...

Those wild Burros really are cute. And your brother looks almost exactly like I pictured him. Very odd. Usually I'm way off when it comes to people and their appearances. That last pic of you and your sister is so cute!

Hee, all that sun, did you get a tan?

[merimask.livejournal.com]

We took a lot of Dam pictures. ;-) Everyone was sick of the damn dam jokes by the end of the day.

And YES! I got the most amazing tan. Plus, my tanning-salon tan beat both my brother's Vegas tan and my sister's Daytona tan...so I win!