My Home Among The Hills

Yeah, I licked it too!

I have been absent on this blog for the last few days.  I’ve been sick but I think we have sort of honed in on the possibility that I have/had some combination of  asthma/allergies/a chest infection…and just experienced a significant episode of it.  I go for more tests in the coming weeks to determine if it is asthma or if Emily has been making me inhale spiders in my sleep.  Anyhow, in addition to being sick, I also went to Las Vegas for a business function.

My co-worker and I left early on my birthday (Wednesday).  We left my house at 4:45 am EST and arrived in Las Vegas at 10:30 am PST.  That left a bunch of time for exploring the area before our work stuff started on Thursday.  I had never been to Las Vegas before so we decided to explore.  I don’t gamble particularly so we avoided all of those sorts of sights…I mean, I played a few slots and a couple of rounds of roulette (I came back $1 ahead!) and visited all of the casinos because each is a spectacle in its own right.  But spending significant time in casinos was not a part of my plans for this trip.

After doing extensive web research in the 10 minutes prior to heading out on the town, we determined that we needed to visit the Stratosphere tower and ride the roller coasters atop the building.

Check out videos of other riders here, here,  here,  here, and here.

The Stratosphere is a fairly tall building in the Las Vegas skyline.  It tops out somewhere around 1100 feet tall.  There are three rides at the top that are sure to make some folks cry and others wish they had brought a change of underclothes.  I have always been into thrills (cheap or otherwise) so this was right up my alley.  Like all such fun things, the proprietors of the rides have automatic cameras set up to capture the looks of fear on riders’ faces.  I have absolutely no sense whatsoever so, rather than being scared, I put on my goofy face for the camera…

The Big Shot ride that jerks you straight up in the air was pretty cool but not in the least bit scary to me.  Heck, I was already super high in the air…what’s another 100 feet?  It was cool though to be about as high as you can legally get in Las Vegas.  The views were incredible.  The ride lifts and drops riders several times very quickly so unlucky folks get a chance to travel up and down through their own vomit several times.

Aftert he Big Shot, we rode  X-Scream.  Follow the link and you’ll get a better description of the ride than I can provide.  This ride was pretty extreme.  It was awesome flying out over the edge of the building over and over.  And luckily for riders, there was no puke ride-through…it all fell to the folks standing on the ground below wondering what was going on atop the building.  Yuck…anyhow, we didn’t really get sick but we had  great thrill in both cases.

We got into all sots of other stuff in Las Vegas and I will share some more tomorrow.  In general though, I am super glad to be back home in WV!