Oct 12th - Vegas!

This has been the Fall of Weddings for us, and I (Charlie) had another bachelor party in early October.  This one was in Las Vegas - somewhere Katie has been a few times, but I had never been.  This was for my friend Jon, whose wedding we are actually going to this weekend.  This was Katie's first time all by herself with the baby and the dog in Chicago, so I only went for one night - I left Friday morning and booked the last flight back Saturday evening.  So it was about 30 hours of Las Vegas, which is still plenty of time there!

We stayed at the Aria hotel, which was very nice - though as this was my first time there, I've got nothing else to compare it to!

We gambled most of the time there, though the most interesting thing I did was go to a gun range there, which was the first thing we did on Friday.  It's a pretty popular thing out there, as there are quite a few gun ranges, and it was a unique experience.  You basically pay a little over 100 bucks to shoot at a paper target - we did a group package with 4 rounds of machine guns and a contest with 2 handgun shots.  Let's just say I did not win either of the competitions!

Other than that, we played blackjack most of the time there, and I did OK with that.  Actually, I won money if you don't count any gambling after 2AM (when I tried a game called Pai Gow Poker that I pretty much didn't understand) or before 9AM (when I bet on Saturday football games - and my only winning pick was Michigan - Go Blue!).

We went to a couple of casinos outside of the Aria's hotel casino, and the most interesting one I remember was (I think) called Sunset Station - it had a ceiling that was made to look like the sky, so it feels like you're outside while you're there.

All in all, it was a fun first time in Vegas, though I was glad I came back a little earlier than the rest of the group and help out with Brady!