So much chaos has invaded our family in the last few months that I swooped up three of my kids: Kristina, Lukas and Annika, and took them to a Las Vegas escape. Erik went with Pappa to motorcycle track day at Barber in Birmingham, Alabama where, according to Erik, most of the girls are blessed with a hot babe gene. This totally quashes my theory that inbreeding always leads to genetic mayhem producing circus freaks and weird looking banjo players. Anyway, back to Vegas. I had a limo pick us up from the house and drive us to the airport. During that 40-minute ride, it was sometimes hard to enjoy the moment, because Lukas was scrunching himself in between Kristina and me to play with the switches for the privacy panel, the TV's. the lights, and the moon roof. I’m certain that car’s electronics will never be the same. After a short flight, another (less opulent) limo drove us to our hotel, the Venetian. When we entered, we were totally wowed. The painted ceiling and walls, the gaudy fixtures, the glitz, the pampering all made us feel much richer than we are. Almost like Paris Hilton out on bail.
While in Vegas we did everything but gamble. (Actually, in the Las Vegas airport while waiting for our flight home, Kristina risked 5 bucks (mine, of course) and made a whopping $3.75!) We took a gondola ride with Rocko, a funny Italian guy with a wonderful voice. Every time he sang, he’d insert kitty meowing wherever he forgot the lyrics. We also went to the shark reef exhibit and touched stingrays. We visited Roy and Siegfried’s Secret Garden with its white tigers and 2 day-old baby dolphin. So cute! We also went to two Cirque du Soleil performances: O and Love. Love was by far the biggest hit and thrilled more than just our resident Beatles fan, Lukas. O was a slight disappointment because they cut out the big fireballs exploding out of the windows, damn lawyers. Lukas and Annika rode the rollercoaster on top of New York New York like a million times. We all saw the pirates fight at Treasure Island and the volcano eruption in front of the Mirage. Inside the Mirage, we say the lion exhibit. We stood in a clear Plexiglas tunnel directly under two lionesses and watched them lazily swat at a ball tossed by the trainer. The size of their rawhide chewies was enormous. Just thankful it wasn’t one of our arms or legs. One of my favorite nighttime experiences was watching the Bellagio fountains dance in rhythm to various songs. That’s worth the trip right there. Despite Lukas’s annoying protests, we also (window) shopped in the Forum Shops at Caesar's Palace and dined in one of its “outdoor” restaurants under a fabulous ceiling with its changing sky. We checked out (and scoffed at) most of the other hotels, shopped in the Coca Cola and M and M stores, ordered room service, swam in the hotel pool, jumped on our beds and had pillow fights. We also went through Madame Tussaud’s wax museum where Kristina and I both dressed in wedding gowns and got married to George Clooney, that two-timing bastard. Hey, Antonio Banderas wasn’t there so what could I do? I can't remember what else we did but we must have walked over 10 miles a day. Our legs and feet are all worn to nubs and screaming for mercy. In all, it was a well-deserved respite that we'll need a vacation to recover from. The bills are starting to show up, though, so Rune is not a happy camper, but screw that! I'd do it again in a Las Vegas minute!
Lukas was hilarious the whole trip. For some reason, he was the only one to notice the thousands upon thousands of business card size ads for strip clubs. Images of monstrous boobs were scattered on sidewalks, stuck in light posts and thrust in our faces by seedy looking characters. It was enough to trigger nightmares (or sweet dreams) in all flat-chested women, plastic surgeons and teenage boys. Lukas also constantly clung to either me or Kristina and hammered us with questions that were often unanswerable like “what would it feel like to not exist?” or “if the past and future and present were happening at the same time, could you come back as a person that's already existed like Thomas Edison?” and “who was the first person to invent a word and what was that word?” and so on. Although most were amazingly creative and thought provoking, you eventually hit an abrupt threshold where you start getting dizzy and confused and stunned and frantic for him to stop. Annika countered our many protests about her poor nutrition with the point that she could always take nutritional supplements--after all, one of her friends has to take iron cuz she's ambidextrous. Hmm. Maybe I need to brush up on my internal medicine knowledge a bit more? So, that was our luxurious Vegas trip. I’m already planning next year’s sequel.