The Hotel was awesome by the way, I highly recommend it.
I got to Vegas about 10 hours before Brian, and the Patriots were going to be on TV creaming the Giants to go to 16-0 for the season, so soon after arriving I set out to find a bar to watch the game. The sun was setting and the palm trees in the foreground made for a nice visual touch outside the hotel, really bringing it home to me that I wasn't in Kansas (or CT) anymore.
I took a cab to the Imperial Palace because the concierge suggested that would be a good place to watch the game. He was wrong. I ended up walking the entire strip looking for a decent restaurant / bar that had the game on, and after passing by the ESPN Zone because it was too packed, settled on a decent little Mexican restaurant in the New York, New York Casino.
Despite being the only Pats fan in a bar full of Giants fans (ahhh, just like being back home in Connecticut), I made some friends at the bar and had a great time taking some good-natured ribbing from them the whole time.
One of the friends I made at the bar was Tom from Toledo who was in town with a friend and their women.
After the game I ended up seeing Cirque Du Soleil's Ka show with Tom, who had found himself with an extra ticket after his buddy passed out in the hotel room. Awesome show, glad I was able to do that, so thanks Toledo Tom - good times!
After the show, I walked back to the Hotel to meet Brian. Bad move that, as the walk ended up being a two mile trek around a giant empty fenced-in lot, this after already walking the strip.
Brian and I partied it up that night, crashing back at the hotel at around 6 AM. That's 9 AM EST, bitches. This is me after a night of debauchery:
This is Brian after the same:
The next night we dressed up all respectable-like...
...and went out looking for a dance club. We never ended up finding one that we wanted to go to, but did get to explore more of the casinos on the Strip and of course drank our faces off.
New Year's Eve found us at AJ's Steakhouse, partying with Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine. We made some new friends there, hanging out with Yanier, Colette:
...and Raul for the rest of the night. Not pictured are the drunk Canadian dudes who were also a blast, and the guy that Brian was doing shots with at the bar who had just been in a motorcycle accident and whose girlfriend claimed to have predicted that they would meet a man who had been bitten by an alligator (Brian was bitten in the leg when he used to wrestle aligators down in Florida). The show was all I had hoped for and more. I just wish I had gotten better pictures than this one:
...but you get the idea (that's the band in the corner).
The trip home was mostly relaxing, but punctuated by moments of abject terror related to landing in a snow storm in Pittsburg 10 minutes before my connecting flight was to leave, and consequently being driven by the airline at what could not have been less than 65 miles per hour on the back of a golf cart through the terminal (next to a really cute girl from DC who I would have loved to have been able to keep talking to, but sadly we were quickly ushered onto our respective flights and had to part ways).
This is the last thing I saw in Vegas:
...but I took so much more away from it. I'm not going to forget this trip for a long time. At least, I'm not going to forget the pieces that I can remember.