We're writing this killing time before boarding our flight home.

Jo & I spent New Years Eve in the bars on the Las Vegas strip. Just before midnight we went out onto the strip to watch the fireworks in the street outside the bellagio. To be honest, although the atmosphere was great, the bonfire fireworks at roundhay/battersea were bigger/better etc!! And the security/police could also learn a thing from us Brits on crowd management as trying to get back up the strip & into a bar afterwards was quite scary as crowds surged towards each other chanting 'crush the barriers' & unconscious/scared people were being dragged over them-not good. But me & Jo survived & settled our nerves with more drinks......

New years day was hot! 22oC and we were walking down the strip taking in the sights & doing a bit of shopping before getting all over the new year all you can eat buffet at the hotel. In less than than 24hours we had gone from daring each other to down jäger to downing mini cream cakes after we had stuffed ourselves with the carvery, pizza, pasta, chinese,Mexican oh and of course multiple trips to the salad bar(!) and complementary wine bar! Unable to eat any more we retired to our room to watch unsolved crime programmes in our stretchy pants :-)

The next day we checked out an outlet shopping place for some bargain shopping then watched the sun set over the strip in a bar on the 108th floor of the stratosphere hotel. No matter how many lychee cocktails we drank we were not going to do the sky dive off the top of the building (we did see a bride doing it tho!) we then went to a bar called margaretaville for our next challenge - eating a portion of volcanic Nachos!! Even between us we couldn't manage to finish them, their nachos our huge!! Yet again we needed our bed & stretchy pants!!

Tuesday and while Jo relaxed for the day Liz was up at 5am to do a tour of Zion and Bryce national parks - once again more impressive scenery! The bonus on this trip was the tour guide was a professional photographer so could show us the good spots for photos and how to use my camera so I could actually get good photos! A long day but worth it. The route out to Zion is similar to the bottom of the grand canyon (and even skirts the north rim) before you see huge rock formations, and at Bryce the sandstone has been weathered so is all spiky - I've never seen anything like it. On the route back the tour guide gave us some history about Vegas and showed us where the bodies are buried......

Yesterday was our last day and we spent it doing a bit more shopping, sightseeing, drinking outside the Mirage hotel by the water features (where an additional feature was a tramp stealing the money out of the wishing well/pool) eating more nachos at margaritaville, fairly uneventful really.

After a challenging morning of packing we seem to have arrived at the airport 5 hours early for our flight. With only a few duty free shops in this terminal is plenty of time to start editing the 2000+ photos I must have taken - will upload them one day........