"Run away with me," says the oh-so-familiar voice on the other end.
Instant panic-mode sets in: "Okay, what happened?"
"Nothing, really, I just thought that Monday is Valentine's Day and we'll have work and then I'll have class, and then it'll be too late to do anything special, so let's go somewhere this weekend."
Wow! Spontaneity! I love it!
He continued, "Tell you what, you start packing and I'll look for hotel reservations. We'll go someplace nice, how 'bout? I'll call you with more details later, kay? But right now I should probably get back to class."
"Okay," I said (or at least I think I said that...by this point I was totally starry-eyed, twitter-pated, and day-dreaming all at the same time). And then it hit me! I hadn't done laundry in a while and all my jeans were dirty! I threw a hurried load into the washer and then frantically began packing our suitcase, giggling all that while and wondering where we could be going.
The phone rang again and I wrestled with my purse to pull my phone from its bottomless depths.
"How does Las Vegas sound? It's far enough away, but not too far and we have reservations starting tonight so I'm skipping out of class early so we can get on the road, kay? We'll leave in the next hour, so be ready."
Ready...right...
An hour later, with my still wet but not quite dripping jeans hanging in the back-seat, we were on our way!
Five hours later, we were on the Strip making our way through the traffic to the MGM Grand Hotel (& Casino. Everything in Vegas is either a Hotel & Casino, or just Casino, but never just a Hotel.)
We parked, checked in and we crashed until the next morning. I'm telling you that Saturday was one of the longest Saturdays I've ever had. It was blissfully long. We had breakfast at the MGM Grand Buffet. It was so-so, but mama's cooking still wins. Then we found the Monorail, and road all the way to the end of the Strip, and caught a cab to Fremont Street.
If you've never been to Fremont Street, I would highly recommend. It was by far my favorite place we went to (not that we went many places, I mean in all reality, Saturday, as long as it felt, still only had 24 hours in it). Basically it's Vegas' version of Disneyland's Main Street USA. There's no through traffic, so you walk everywhere, and there are vendors and kiosks everywhere. Jefferson and I were mesmerized by the artists. Holy cow! There was this one spray-paint artist who was ama-za-zing! I can't evenly spray-paint anything, and he was creating space-scenes, complete with planets, stars, everything! He could make woodland scenes, too, as well as city-scapes. We were in awe and watched him work his magic. Honestly, he deserved applause after each piece.
Then I saw the caricature booth. You know those super exaggerated cartoon drawings, I watched another couple get one and thought how cute that would be to have as a keepsake (Especially since this trip was so spontaneous that we both forgot our dead cameras' chargers!).
We sat in that booth for about forty-five minutes as an artist captured us in that moment. Here was the end result:
Stinkin' hysterical I tell ya! I love it!
After that, we decided to skip the cab back to our hotel, and walked instead (I mean with the "" as a landmark, it wasn't too hard to just walk in that general direction until we hit the Strip)
We snagged a quick lunch and I took a nap until dinner. We dressed up all fancy, like the way you see James Bond in all those movies, and strutted our stuff on the red carpet of the casino until we found a place where we wanted to eat: the Rainforest Cafe. It was really family oriented (namely non-smoking, honestly, I don't think I will ever get the smell of cigarettes out of our clothes) and had, as Jefferson puts it, the best restaurant dessert he's ever had: the Volcano. A tiered masterpiece of chocolatey confection, the Volcano was the only thing we bagged up and took back to our hotel room.
Sunday dawned and we made a quick pit-stop to visit the Hardy's, a sweet elderly couple who knew Jefferson and his family from when they lived in Asia for all those years. Then it was off home, getting there just in time to pass out and make it to work the next day without anyone knowing about our sneak vacation/Valentine's day getaway!
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