New Year's in Vegas

Last blog post about 2023, finally!  Time to return to Las Vegas for a couple days (one main reason is detailed below).  We did some reminiscing about past races with friends.  My favorite experiences in any city is time spent doing urban races.  The "good old days", from our perspective.

The theme of this particular visit was something new, however.  There's this Sphere thing there now, and you really can't miss it:

The display is always moving and changing - sometimes it has giant eyeballs:

We briefly looked at ticket prices for an inside-the-sphere experience (ex-sphere-ience?) and decided to watch from the outside instead.

An up-close look at a small fraction of the gagillion LED lights:

You know I rarely take pictures of our food.  This lunch, at Down 2 Earth, was deliciously photo-worthy (and close to a Rivian charging station):

Um, sure... but what about when I make this face?

We walked up and down the Strip, remembering mad dashes in various directions for checkpoints and selfies:

We saw a couple fun shows - Potted Potter (all 7 Harry Potter books condensed into 70 minutes of silliness and lively use of props) and RuPaul's Drag Race (with a lovely host and talented "competitors").  Shows like these are excellent reasons to go into casinos, for those of us who rarely gamble.

Something else new and also tall (maybe not quite as tall as the Sphere though) - she's near the Vegas Arena, and she's quite stunning:

We didn't manage to capture the fountain show at Bellagio...

So instead, here's a picture from 2002:

Ducks!!

A global (and rotating) Sphere scene:

Ah, here we are at the "reason for Vegas" - a New Year's Eve show with John Oliver and Seth Meyers!  We heard the announcement for it while listening to the Strike Force Five (explosion!) podcast, and it didn't take long to throw together a little trip to Nevada.

We attempted way too many pictures trying to get a decent selfie on the way into the show, most of which were like this (or worse):

Here's the only shot that halfway works, although even our mimicry was rather lacking:

At least the show itself was really good, hilarious and entertaining, and fun to see John and Seth doing stand-up comedy instead of their TV gigs.  The rest of our trip was good, and this topped it off to made it completely worth it.

A brief interlude while waiting for the midnight fireworks show (which was way past our bedtime, but hey, how often do we get to ring in the new year in Vegas?), so we wandered over to the back Conservatory of the Bellagio.

Admiring the elaborate Nutcracker display:

A giant Clara on a huge couch:

Impressive!

Then it was time to find a place to watch the fireworks.  We'd scoped out a parking garage roof (above where we parked Tug-E, conveniently) and started that way.  With the crowds on the Strip and the road closures, we ended up having to run to make it on time...

Happily, we had at least 34 seconds to spare (we could see the Sphere from our vantage point, for the official countdown):

What an amazing fireworks show!  It was coordinated from the tops of various casinos up and down the Strip, all doing similar (and large) displays of light and sound:

We could see much of it from our parking garage roof (which was also much less crowded than the streets).  A shot from the finale:

Happy 2024, y'all!

And finally, one random picture that I think we took by mistake while clowning around:

Super fun trip!