In at least one of my other A to Z posts, I mentioned my road trip to California and back with my best friend and our daughters. One of the places we went on that road trip was Las Vegas. Our husbands flew out there to meet us. If I’m being totally honest, Las Vegas didn’t do much for me. And I don’t think it had much to do with being in Vegas with kids. I just think Vegas isn’t my kind of place.
Our original plan was to do the tourist-y stuff during the day then let the girls relax and swim at night when the adults would come out in drunken droves. That plan got thwarted immediately when we discovered that the pool at the hotel we stayed at (Excalibur) closed at 5:00. Not happy. So off we went in the night time with kids in Las Vegas.
I found Vegas to be not a lot of fun. It was too crowded and too hard to get around. There was way too much traffic flow into casinos when all I wanted to do was walk. But simply walking down the street is difficult. Also, things are pretty spread out. We tried using a cab for a while, but that was bad, too, because there was so much traffic, it took forever to get anywhere.
We did take the girls to Fremont Street, which was cool. But the coolness factor doesn’t last for hours. We also took the girls to the pirate show outside Treasure Island, but it was a teensy bit risque for our girls who were still in grade school/junior high. We also took them to fountains at the Bellagio which was really cool! (At least it was until last summer when I was in Dubai and saw the fountains outside the Burj Khalifa. But more on that in another blog post!)
The girls definitely loved the M & M Store, and we adults found Hoover Dam interesting (but the girls were sure we were killing them with boredom). We didn’t really gamble much. Truth told, I’m not a huge gambler anyway. I enjoy roulette, but when I did this Vegas trip, I didn’t know how to play roulette then.
Maybe I’d enjoy Vegas more without kids, but I just didn’t see much there that I thought was all that great. Time will tell if I ever get back there.
Another day in the Blogging A to Z Challenge, another day I’m behind! Ahhh, I’ll get caught up this weekend 🙂
If you have ever participated in the Blogging A to Z Challenge, then you know that there is always at least one Achille’s Heel in your alphabet — at least one letter that gives you fits when it comes to choosing a topic. Well, welcome to my Achille’s Heel. Today’s post about New Jersey is quite a stretch.
Last year, my husband and I joined our friends Larry and Cathy at the Indianapolis 500. Larry and Cathy have been going for many years and Jim and I have always thought it would be fun. Listening to Larry and Cathy talk about it just cemented our belief that this was something that we HAD to do! And it didn’t disappoint!
I am still a day behind on my blogging, so today I am covering the letter H, which is for Houston, Texas. I guess I’m not talking about Houston itself but more about the Houston area. My father has lived in Houston for a number of years and I always swore I would never go to Texas because there are too many tornadoes on Texas. But I had to swallow that fear once my father moved there, and as it turns out, I really love Houston! My father has lived in the Houston area near Hobby Airport for a number of years, so I’ve also gotten to head out to Galveston often, too. Galveston is a roughly an hour from Houston depending on where in Houston you are coming from. It’s nice to live close enough to a beach town like Galveston but far enough not to be swamped with storm surge when hurricane waters surge in. I’ve also had the chance to go to 
— the Fun Ships! I have been on (I think) 6 cruises and they have all been on Carnival. I really enjoy Carnival because it is a great mix of adult and family fun, casual and fancy atmosphere. My first cruise, I was super nervous about not being able to see land. It took me no time at all to love the feeling of being completely surrounded by water, feeling so small on that big boat. I have only cruised to Cozumel and Progreso, Mexico,
My theme for this year’s Blogging A to Z Challenge is travel. Which is why it’s probably a little weird that today’s post is about Edwardsville, Illinois. It’s certainly not some hot tourist destination, but it’s a place my husband and I enjoy traveling to as often as we can. That’s because our daughter attends school at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville.
I am one of “those” people — a Disney maniac! I took my very first Disney trip when I was 10 years old. My parents took our family on a road trip from Omaha (where we lived at the time) to Pasadena, CA, and back. One of our stops was 
The View from the Cheap Seats 