SO LONG VEGAS - DAY 5

April 6, 2016

(Wednesday)

The main reason that I went back to Vegas 6 months after I moved is that I had a Southwest voucher that was going to expire in July AND I needed to be sure that I made the right decision in moving . . . and I did.

This trip was simply validating my decision to leave.

When I had Vegas in my head, to live there when I was living in Orlando, the plan was to move to Vegas for 4 to 5 years and build my resume and come back to Orlando or wherever my career brings me.

I made some lifelong friendships.

Held 3 different job titles in two casinos.

Traveled a heck of a lot (as usual).

Grew closer to God at Verve Church.

Simply made unforgettable memories.

Vegas is a second home for me since I went out there alone and established myself with no family and just a friend or two initially. It's definitely an emotional place.

I'm sad typing this right now just because I know that emotional feeling with gradually go away once I've been gone long enough. It's inevitable. 

Time has a way of doing that.

I love you, Vegas, for the great experiences and thank you for letting me see that God lives everywhere. He is with us EVERYWHERE we go.

Live. Life. Out. Loud.

MORE VISITING AND FUN - VEGAS DAY 4

April 5, 2016

(Tuesday)

Janet and I woke up Tuesday morning and had breakfast then we left the house to meet up with Travis at Casa De Luz at 10:30am.

I met Travis in December of 2011 and I had moved to Vegas 1 month earlier. I was trying All People Christian Church in Southern Highlands and Travis and his family went there during that time. I remember he asked me if he could pray for me after the first service I'd been to, after he introduced himself to me. 

We've been friends ever since!

He invited us down to see the gardens they are planting in some areas so that people can grow what they need. He joked because we helped with a few things with this one and he said, "I bet you didn't think you were volunteering this morning!" but it's always great to see what God has put in Travis's path for him to do.

Great man of God.

I used to see Travis weekly back in 2012 and then life happened and I got busy with work, etc. 

I have got to stop this awful trend of life getting in the way of my friendships.

Glad we're brothers and sisters in Christ from across the Country!

We left Casa De Luz around noon and drove back into town to have Sushi with Nam.

I was DYING for Oyshi because it was always SO good when we ate there and it wasn't as good as I remember it.

I was off pondering thoughts as Janet and Nam were chatting and just thinking to myself that we (all people) have got to just remember some of our memories and that they were great back when they happened and when you try to recreate them, it's NEVER the same.

I did enjoy hanging out and catching up.

And being able to capture this photo of Nam signing with a flower pen.

And Nam is wearing the Star Wars shirt I got him for Christmas!

We then went to Janet's and had some time before GAME NIGHT at Gia's house so we decided to research cruises again.

Long story short, we booked Janet's BIRTHDAY CRUISE to the BAHAMAS! 

I told Janet that we should just do a cruise out of Miami since she's never been. So we will stay at Loews Miami ON her birthday and celebrate on South Beach then the next day, we depart for Cocoa Cay and Nassau. It's 4 days and 3 nights on Royal Caribbean.

95 days until we reunite in Miami!

Janet will be turning old....29.

(Welcome to almost being 30....it's actually pretty great so you're almost in the cool club)

We then made our way to Gia's house! 

Lori (Gia's mom and my best friend) took off of work to hang with all of us for the night!!!

WE LOVE LORI !

(Sadly, as I'm uploading pictures, we didn't take a picture with her. UGH. I did terrible with pictures this trip!)

Marytza and her babies came to the PARTAY too!

From left to right: Nicholas, Greg, Gia, Marytza, Janet and the kiddos, Tony and Abby.

We all worked at The Cromwell together. 

Work friends are typically loyal or "real" friends but once in a while you find some that are keepers.

This picture was taken so early in the night and the night was only JUST getting started...

We played several games:

Would You Rather?

Cranium

Catch Phrase

Cards Against Humanity (which is great fun to play w/ Lori! mainly because of how embarrassed Gia gets.)

Janet hates doing anything where she feels embarrassed (as most of us would do but not with friends!!!) and she apparently thought this would be better than having to do something goofy.

So she CHOSE to have to hold her tongue for a certain amount of time.

And she drooled a few times....

THIS right here, had me CRYING laughing. 

I was LAUGHING SO HARD the rest of the night after this happened.

Gia chose to have each of us apply make up on her. 

This was the end result...BEAUTIFUL.

Don't mess with no Italian Chola.

Cards Against Humanity is such an inappropriately great game.

We stayed several hours and finally left late at night just because we were so tired.

We hung out a good 6 hours and it was SO MUCH FUN.

THANK YOU Gia and Lori for feeding us and playing games with us!!!!

DAY OF VISITING EVERYONE - VEGAS DAY 3

April 4, 2016

(Monday)

I woke up early on Monday morning to meet Melissa for coffee at The Cromwell. 

We laugh now because we're friends but when I first started at The Cromwell, EVERYONE confused us. They thought we were sisters. It was NOT fun when we didn't know each other like that BUT now it's all good and we definitely joke about it.

As you can see in the pic below, we have similar haircuts and features and we're both amazingly cool of course.

It was great catching up just after being gone from Vegas for 6 months. 

Same old thing in our industry. 

It's just a matter of where we'll be next for our next adventure. 

It's great having friends in the industry who understand the latter, work schedule, and inconsistencies of the industry.

Don't ask why we did a prom picture but we did and it was funny.

After I got back from meeting Melissa for coffee, we checked out of the Rio at 10am and headed to Downtown Summerlin.

We ate at this Mexican Restaurant (of course it was a Mexican restaurant) that Janet has been wanting to try.

I was not mad at all because the food was SO good!

After we ate, we headed to my friend Nathan's place to see about booking a cruise for Janet's birthday. We didn't end up booking because we wanted to gather more information. And we were meeting Nicholas at his house so we ended up leaving there to hang with Nicholas.

Jasper missed me and I missed Jasper!

We didn't even take a picture with Nicholas! We are terrible.

It was fun catching up and learning about Nicholas starting at Top Golf. 

Basically, everyone has left Cromwell. It's just not going anywhere. Should that change in time, I'm sure but life is too short to wait around forever.

We have to make things happen.

We then went to Janet's to get ready to meet up with Margaret and Nathan.

Again, we didn't take pictures ! What the heck!

We ended up just going to Margaret's house (which I'm always up for hanging at anyone's house rather than going out) and we caught up and talked.

It was soon good see them again. I remember Margaret making conversation with me at Verve before we really hung out and could say we were friends. She's always been so sweet. We used to go indoor rock climbing once a week before life got busy and our schedules didn't match up anymore.

We have great memories.

I also went on our missions trip to Poland with Margaret and Nathan back in 2013. 

Janet and I left after catching up for a couple of hours and we were asleep by 9:30pm.

We had some full days in just the 3 days I'd been in town.

SO SO good catching up with so many beautiful faces !

BEING A TOURIST IN VEGAS - DAY 2

April 3, 2016 

(Sunday)

 Since we both got 10 hours of sleep (haha) we were up at 7:45am to get ready for the day. 

We were going to Verve at 9am then straight to Rio to stay on the strip one night and be tourists. 

It felt SO good to see all of my Verve family!! I started attending Verve (http://vivalaverve.org) in 2013. It was recommended to me because my work schedule didn't allow me to go on Sundays and Verve had Monday night services. So when I attended for about the first year, I went on Monday nights. I absolutely LOVE it there and highly recommend it. 

After service, Janet and I drove to Rio to check in. 

I played with snapchat filters on the way....as you can see in the pic below.

 We made a stop at the Las Vegas Sign, before getting to Rio, since I didn't have a picture in front of this classic sign in the 4 years that I lived in Vegas. 

We were FOR SURE tourists this day.

I tell Janet to lift up her arm like mine and she says, "It is!"

Then we see THIS picture and start laughing so hard because her arm is NOT up!

After we took a couple of pictures, we headed to the Rio. It was about 11am. The line was SO long to check in. We were hungry and had planned to lay out at the pool until our room was ready. 

We ended up checking in our luggage and I had texted Mike, my friend and manager at the Cromwell, to see if he was there today so we could stop in and he was! 

So we ended up driving to the Crowell for breakfast at Giada's.

On our way into the Cromwell, I saw Mike and Hector (bellman) and chatted with them. Then I stopped at Bound and saw Mike Norrby, Greg (valet), and a few others and we all walked towards Giada's since we were heading that way. 

It felt good being at the Cromwell but I didn't miss working there. 

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed my time while I was there and have made some pretty great friendships but I'm happy where I am today.

When we were seated, we had a BEAUTIFUL window view and it was such a nice day that the windows were open.

It was expensive but really worth it!

The food was DELICIOUS !

I am a sucker for some red Sangria.

Kevin hears I was on property and surprised us for a visit upstairs! 

Kevin and his wife, Mandy, are so sweet.

(Bring the family for a trip to Orlando!)

Then Marina texted me and heard I was upstairs so she came and visited briefly. 

She told me she was pregnant and then a few days after I flew back to Florida, I was the first to know that she's having a baby girl! She was a little boy so he will be a big brother.

I'm so happy for her!!!

We saw Tony walking through so I stopped and bothered him a little.

Tony was my boss while I was at the Front Office; he's great fun!

After a very good breakfast and a small reunion with my work family, we got to Rio around 2:45pm. We still hadn't been informed that our room was ready so we went to the pool. It was hot and there was a bee flying around us so I called to find out about our room and guess what, it had BEEN ready, and no one contacted us. 

I understood what it was like, from the guest perspective, since I work at the front office.

I was only frustrated because we had dinner reservations on the other end of the strip. 

We got into our room around 3:30pm and immediately got ready for dinner.

Normally I take pictures of the room but I guess I didn't this time. We didn't have a view but it was a nice spacious room with a big bathroom.

We left the hotel around 5pm and took an uber to, "Top of the World", a well known restaurant inside of the Stratosphere Hotel.

Our reservations were at 6pm which was perfect because we were able to see Vegas in the daylight and saw the sunset and then the evening view.

Janet ordered a 16 oz. ribeye steak and I got a 9 oz. filet and we shared a potato puree with something on top. 

(I can't remember what the something on top was)

People can bungee off the top of the stratosphere so we saw people do that which was fun.

I was SO full after eating that I was uncomfortable and I look at Janet and say, "... Maybe if I throw up a little bit ..." and I was serious! 

We both just start laughing.

Don't worry, I didn't throw up but we definitely needed to walk off this food.

 Since we dined at the restaurant, we were able to go to the observation tower without having to pay extra.

 It was a little windy !

I wouldn't pay to go to the observation tower. There are SO many places on the strip to see the strip up high such as the High Roller, flying in/out of Vegas, Mandarin Bar, Drai's, Trump hotel, etc. 

 We can't take normal pictures. 

I take selfies whilst Janet uses the bathroom every other hour.

We took a cab to SLS since Janet didn't want to walk 20 steps to the hotel . . . 

We went to one of our favorite coffee spots inside SLS!

We've stayed at SLS twice before. It's a nice hotel, just in an inconvenient location.

We then took the monorail to Harrah's (since we had never been on the monorail) then walked to Venetian. We stopped at this bar called "Rock House" and it was dead but a ton of fun. They had a pool table, foosball and shuffle board. 

Janet won at shuffle board but not at foosball!

We walked to Cromwell to see some beautiful faces such as Linda! She was able to hang for a little so that was nice and there was a REALLY good singer at Bound that night. Linda took a phone call and walks away and Janet immediately turns to me and says, "Let's pretend like we're putting something in Linda's drink when she's walking back." I look at Janet and simply say, ". . . you are so mature."

We could NOT stop laughing because Janet was so serious about doing this and I'm looking at her like, are you really suggesting this right now?! Like, how old are we?! 

HILARIOUS

Gia transferred to Beverage! 

After we caught up with Linda and then waited for Gia to come in, we left back to the Rio to go to bed.

Such a fun tourist day for us. Though Janet has grown up in Vegas and I lived there the last 4 years, we hadn't done some of the "touristy" things so we enjoyed it.

I will say that when I now go back to visit, I do NOT want to go on the strip AT ALL.

UNLESS it's to see a show but that's it. 

It's just the SAME thing every single night and not fun to be around.

I love you, Las Vegas, but not enough to stick around! 

It was fun. Thank you for letting me use you !

#ForeverMemories