We had decided the cheapest and easiest way to get from Santa Monica to Las Vegas would be via car sharing. Looking online we found a young guy named James heading to Vegas exactly when we needed to go. We would be leaving tomorrow, so we booked 2 nights at a hotel on the strip for the experience and arranged some couch surfing for in a few days time.
Saying goodbye to our lovely host Newsha, we met with James around 12ish and headed northbound to Vegas.
LA to Las Vegas takes a good few hours by car, but because James was a really easy guy to make conversation with the time flew. James asked if we had experienced an In and Out burger yet. When we said no, he insisted the next stop must be an In and Out. This particular burger joint, which allows you to select how you would like your burgers to be made. I opted for the protein burger, which is a patty, cheese and salad wrapped in lettuce leaves, instead of a bun. It was really nice.
Tim and James
In and Out Protein Burger
On the road to Vegas
When we arrived into Vegas, I was blown away by all of the lights. It was so cool to see such a busy city literally in the middle of the desert. James dropped us at our hotel for the next 2 nights, The Quad, we said our thank yous, gave him some money towards petrol and parted ways.
After checking in we dropped off our luggage and got ready to explore the city.
Sin City!!
Bellagio Fountain
The Luxor
The next day we went to a timeshare presentation that lasted 2 hours, we enjoyed complimentary hot drinks and sandwiches and listened to people try to sell us timeshare. Why you might ask, well it gave us greatly reduced tickets to see the Cirque du Soleil show ‘O’, the water acrobatic show that we really wanted to see whilst we were in Vegas.
The show was for tonight, so after the timeshare presentation we made our way to the Bellagio Casino.
Fantastic Show
‘O’ was fantastic, highly recommend if you are interested in the Cirque du Soleil shows.
The next morning we were being picked up by our Vegas hosts Ivan and Jennifer. Ivan was into magic and hypnosis, a big reason why we sent them a request as Tim really enjoys magic and would love to be hypnotized.
When they collected us we headed back to their place, which wasn’t far from the strip at all and couldn’t get over how awesome the inside of their house was.
Ivan and Jennifer
There was decorative graffiti everywhere, the roof looked like that of a warehouse,the kitchen was decorated to look like Super Mario – the exhaust fan painted green to look like one of the tubes Marion goes down – and there was funky furniture and decorations everywhere. Was super cool.
Super Mario kitchen
That night Ivan and Jennifer took us out to the strip to catch up with 2 more of their couch surfers who had decided to spend two nights on the strip and to watch a local show called ‘The Balloon Man’, let’s just say it was different 🙂 Jennifer was participating this week, so was fun to watch.
View from Caesar’s Palace
- Balloon Art
Yes, that is money stapled to the creepy looking clown’s face
The other couch surfers, Julie and Michael, were really nice too. We decided to do a road trip to The Grand Canyon with them, you can read that blog post here.
The next day we were planning on saying our farewells to Ivan and Jennifer, so the 6 of us and Ivan and Jen’s neighbour Michael went to the ‘Black Bear Diner’ for a true American feasts. The servings were huge!
The menus were printed onto newspaper
Here is where our 4 day planned trip to Vegas turned into 65 days…you can read our highlights of Las Vegas here.
