The Magic of Las Vegas

                                                                                                                                                           First, we went to the Bellagio and visited the conservatory, which was filled with Christmas cheer (except when the Grinch came along!😈). There was the biggest nutcracker I’ve ever seen and guess what?! It was made out of roses🌹! There was also a giant train🚂 that we could walk through, with silly elves🧝🏾‍♀️🧝🏻 all around, and a fountain decorated with huge Christmassy instruments. 

We spotted a little eating area inside a gingerbread house, but you needed a reservation🎫, so we couldn’t go in. We did peek inside though, and it was super cute. The conservatory smelled so yummy that we went into a little gift shop to buy a candle🕯️ that smelled exactly like it. Now our trailer smells delicious🤤! 

After that, we stopped at the cutest stand called Peppermint Express  and we all got peppermint hot cocoa☕. We took our hot cocoa outside to see the HUGE fountain⛲. It started shooting super high and dancing🪩 to music🎶🎵! 

Next, we walked down The Strip. It was loud and crowded, but also really cool. We realized we were close to an art🖼️ museum we had heard about and decided we might as well go. 

The Arte Museum was amazing🤯. Everything was on giant screens, and it was beautiful and really fun. The screens were enormous, and every room had a different amazing smell👃🏻! There was one room that didn’t use screens, just floating paper balls in a room full of mirrors, even on the floor. It looked like it went on forever, and it felt like we were floating. The colors changed, and sometimes it looked like stars⭐ and other times like raindrops💧. The last room was the size of a ballroom, and I had to dance when the entire room was filled with music and Monet’s beautiful ballerina🩰 paintings. 

After we finished, we walked across a bridge that went right over The Strip to the Rainforest Café for dinner. It was super cool, and we got a seat right next to the fake gorillas and guess what?! They moved and made sounds. It was so funny. Every once in a while, it would get dark, and it sounded like there was a thunderstorm. It even flashed like lightning! It was so much fun. 

The next day, we took a road trip on our road trip (hehe) to Death💀 Valley, the lowest point in North America at 283 feet below sea🌊 level. We walked out on the salt flats, where Demory, Mom, and I did a tiny lick of the salt while Sayer put a whole chunk in his mouth. It looked disgusting😝, and he spit it out right away! It was pretty unique because there had been a big flood recently, so the basin had a lot of water in it. The reflection of the mountains in the super salty water was chef’s kiss😙. 

Right outside the national park was Rhyolite, a really interesting ghost town. First, we saw a house made out of glass bottles🍾. Then we had a picnic in front of a building that used to be an old train depot but was most recently a casino. One thing we thought was interesting is that the town only lasted about seven years and had 5,000–8,000 people👥 living there before everyone abandoned it because they weren’t finding any gold💰! 

Also in Rhyolite is the Goldwell Open Air Museum, which had a bunch of weird but cool statues. My favorite was the window one because, depending on which side you looked through, it showed totally different things. One side framed a beautiful view of the mountains🌄, and the other framed a statue of a naked lady. 

Mom and Dad wanted to go to the Neon Museum. I wasn’t very excited about it, but it ended up being kinda cool. We learned that neon signs use different gases to make different colors: neon, argon, and xenon (we had to look it up to remember!). They had a scavenger hunt for kids, which Demory and I did, and it was really funny. At one point, Demory was reading a sign to me, and I thought she said a man milked horses!🐎 I was so surprised that I ran and told Mom, and Mom was like, “What?!”🫨 We read the sign again and realized the man USED horses to TRANSPORT the milk… he didn’t milk them🐮🥛. 

One afternoon, we went to Container Park and had so much fun playing in the treehouse playground. We ate our favorite poke bowls and ran back and forth to watch the fire show every time the Mantis started performing. It was so cool! He can shoot flames from his antlers up to six stories high! 🔥

Another day, we went to The Venetian Hotel, and it was super cool. We rode on a gondola, and our gondolier sang to us🎶. The craziest part was that the canals were inside, but the ceiling was painted with clouds☁️ and looked like we were outside! 

After that, we went to the M&M store, which was AMAZING. The whole place smelled like the most delicious chocolate,🍫 and the smell hit you on the sidewalk before you even walked through the door. There were four floors and an escalator to take you up to them. On the second floor, there was a huge M&M wall that looked like a rainbow. There were at least 50 flavors to choose from and even more colors! We each got to fill up a cup. Demory got mostly mint because it was so good, and Sayer got all pumpkin pie!🥧

Nana and Pepe gave us an early Christmas present, so on our last night, we got to see Mat Franco’s magic show.🎩🪄 It was crazy! At one point, he disappeared from his seat on stage and then instantly appeared in the back of the theater, then just walked back down to the stage like it was no big deal! We wrapped up our night with rainbow cake from a CAKE🍰 vending machine. It was the perfect end to our magical week in Las Vegas!