Evil Day Star!

Well, I guess since it powers effectively all life on earth it's probably not all bad, but damn the sun was hot today in Valencia! Tracy & I spent most of today at Six Flags Magic Mountain, our first serious coaster park of the trip. Wow, it was well worth the wait. While I still count Cedar Point in Ohio as my #1 park, Magic Mountain is excellent and I wouldn't recommend going to the mid-west if you don't have to.

The photo above is of a coaster called just "X", a unique train design where a third rail's position in relation to the main track causes the seats to rotate along a unique axis and creates an experience not yet offered anywhere else.

We're so tired at truckin' around the park all day in the sun. And who would have thought a park with "mountain" in its name would be so full of hills?!? But we're also really glad we went. The park is very well kept and the coasters are top notch. Pretty much every style of coaster is available there, all in one place. Besides the coasters, we also paid a little extra so we could go on a 150-foot high "Dive Devil" free-fall swing. Tracy got to pull the cord on that one and send us dropping and swinging at 60mph! Fun!

Food options were a bit limited, but we did enjoy some vegetable sushi near the end of our day. We drank what seemed like gallons of water too, trying to keep comfortable and hydrated.

Speaking of drinking lots of water, we had dinner with Mr. Johnson himself tonight :-) This was Tracy's first time to meet Brian and she was such a sweetheart for letting us geek out  a little bit about work over dinner. The food tonight was at Native Foods and it was outstanding. Please please please please open a Native Foods in Connecticut (Wallingford would be great :-) ). Tracy had the "California French Dip" sandwich, and I had the "Chicken Run Ranch Burger. Both sandwiches were terrific, really really good.

Brian walked us over to Whole Foods so we could pick up some snackage for the road trip to Vegas tomorrow. Should be fun.

Pete, our wedding photographer, sent us a few preview images. He took over 1100 images! And we get them all, negatives and raw digitals (he uses both types of cameras). He's even getting the negatives scanned for us. Great photographer, too bad he doesn't have a website for me to link to :-( Anyhow, Peter Black's Wedding Bells Photography rocks.

I've never seen as much nothing as we did today driving out to Las Vegas from Los Angeles. Now, of course there are places in the world, in this country even, with much more nothing, but I'm just talking about my personal experience here. But after a few hours of driving through nothing, interupted only by occational Starbucks / Factory Outlet Oasises, we reached Primm Valley, the first set of casinos on the way to vegas and home of Desperado, a very large steel coaster... which is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. DAMMIT! What is it with my luck and closed coasters on this trip. Luckily it's only about 45 minutes from Vegas so we'll go back there when it is open.  After saying a mighty "Pssha!" and giving Buffalo Bill "the hand", we were back on I-15 heading up to Sin City.

For the rest of the week we're staying at Circus Circus, the cheapest hotel on the strip, give or take. We wanted to have cash to spend enjoying shows and rides, since we're not spending much time in the room. I was here in 2001 for CES with "my friend Adam", so it's quite familiar. Some things have changed, mostly restaurants getting renamed. Adam will be disappointed to hear that The Pink Pony is no more, replaced by casinoCAFE. Sorry bud.

After checking in and doing a bit of planning, we headed west from The Strip to track down the only vegan restaurant in the city, Go Raw Cafe. Not as "strictly vegan" as I'd assumed, since they sell honey and bee pollen, but in a city where "Prime Rib Buffet" is king, that can slide. Tracy & I were both very happy with our food, and we splurged to support a good business. We opted for their samplers so we could try out more options. I got the Mexicali Sampler and Tracy got the Italian Sampler. Both were quite good and very filling. We also got some of their "toast", a smoothy for me and a freshly opened young coconut for Tracy. We even picked up some desert to bring back with us, though even now we're not hungry enough to eat them, hours later.

After dropping off our stuff in the room we went off to check out the Midway Arcade at Circus Circus, as well as the performers "under the big top." Once we were out of quarters we wandered outside and walked down to Treasure Island and then back on the opposite side of The Strip. It's quite a walk so I'm glad we did it during the night. It's still warm out even late. Tomorrow night we're going to see Spamalot at the Wynn, and we'll hit a couple of the rides nearby during the day.

Photos of our trip so far can be found here. I also updated my stats at Coaster Counter, I've now been on 84 different coasters. Closing in on the 100 mark!

We started the day off with Ronald's Doughnuts, a nearly famous spot in Las Vegas for vegans, with two-thirds of their offerings being vegan. We couldn't gorge ourselves as I've read some accounts of people doing, and had a small, but sweet, breakfast before our first big day of exploring. We started off by going to the Stratosphere and buying passes to go up it's 900 foot tower to enjoy the three thrill rides on top.

The weather was perfect and the only line we had was for the security checkpoint at the bottom of the tower. The first was Big Shot, a launch tower right at the tip top. It was a very cool experience to blast up into the air and feel yourself falling weightless for a breif moment. After Big Shot, we went on X-Scream, a strange little car-on-a-moving-slide thingy where you sit down then slide off of the edge of the tower, stopping abruptly at the end of the slide rail. It's quite an intense experience, and the ride repeats that with little variations a few times before you end up secured back in the loading deck. Tracy & I don't usually have any problems with the heights of rides, but this thing gave us a heart twitter. Finally we boarded Insanity, a set of swings that rotate on an arm that swings the whole lot out over the edge of the tower. We felt much more secure on this one, but got quite dizzy from the spinning. The view couldn't be beat though, and it's the longest ride of the three.

After going down the tower we headed over to Sahara to take a trip on Speed: The Ride, a launch coaster that loops and twists right along The Strip. We were both impressed with how fast the ride was and how tight into the hotel structure and the street it seemed. It was over pretty quick though.

Tracy had a craving for lunch so we asked Miss Garmin where we could find some japanese food and she directed us to Sushi Factory. Not an especially vegetarian place, but it's usually a pretty safe bet to go with veggie sushi anywhere. The motto on the menu was "We serve fresh dead fish".... seriously. The food was fine and we headed back to Circus Circus to rest a bit before exploring the attached Adventuredome amusement center. I've been to it before when I was in Vegas with Adam. He'll be pleased to know that our favorite soccer shoot-out table-based paddle game is still there. Tracy and I played a couple of games. She picked it up quickly and our second game was a good match that I barely won.

After playing some games we headed off to get a taxi over to the Wynn resort where we were scheduled to see Monty Python's Spamalot, a popular musical we had heard good things about. After picking up out tickets we went over to the buffet to get some dinner. Now, a vegan at a Las Vegas buffet, as you can imagine, has about as much luck as a someone playing craps while drunk. But we both were able to find dishes that worked for us and we ended up quite full, if a bit lighter in the wallet than we should have been for what we ate.

The show itself was awesome. Our seats were cheap and not great, but the whole theater had good views and we really enjoyed the humor, music and production value. Tracy was cracking up at many points! Spamalot is well worth catching in Vegas, on Broadway or if the touring company comes nearby.

Tomorrow we're doing a little spa action in the morning, then going to ride the coaster at New York New York, and doing the Star Trek Experience *cough*geeks*cough* Then later in the evening we're seeing the Cirque du Soleil's KÀ at MGM Grand. Should be quite a night!

First off, KÀ is incredible. I'll return to that topic in a bit, trust me.

Today started off with a bit of pampering at the salon/spa here in Circus Circus. It's not much to talk about, compared to the posh offerings at other resorts, but it's certainly located close by ;-) That was quite a treat, something I'd like to spend more time doing next time we're traveling. After that we drove over to the Hilton to check out Star Trek: The Experience. In my youth I was quite a trekkie. My mom used to buy me stuff off of QVC whenever they had a star trek special. Thanks mom, for putting up with all that! Star Trek: The Experience was fun for both of us. We didn't spend much time exploring the "meusem", but we did both of the attractions and I had a pint of Romulan Ale at Quark's Bar. Fat Penguin got in on some photos.  From the Hilton we took the Las Vegas Monorail all the way down the strip to the MGM Grand, and walked from there across the Strip to New York New York, which has the biggest coaster on the strip: Manhattan Express. The trains on this one were well themed as taxi cabs and the ride was ok overall. It wasn't very smooth for a steel coaster, and the ride operators weren't pleasant... though maybe that's part of the NYNY theming ;-)

Up next was M&M World, a multi-level retail monument to small candy covered chocolates. I had hoped to get some dark chocolate M&Ms, but alas they weren't vegan either. Tracy really enjoyed the store and picked up a bunch of little M&M figures to decorate her office with. And Fat Penguin got in some photos, of course.

After taking the monorail back to the Hilton we returned to Circus Circus for some dinner and to change before returning to the MGM Grand for our Cirque du Soleil show. We decided to try the buffet here and compare it to the one we had at the Wynn yesterday. Ugg, you really do get what you pay for, even when you're dealing with the limited vegetarian options in Vegas. The Circus Buffet is crap. It's cheap though.

Once we drove back to the MGM Grand we picked up our tickets to KÀ and headed over to the Rouge Lounge for some drinks. Expensive, but tasty. The staff was pretty attentive and it was a perfect spot to do some people watching. After that we still had more time to kill so I showed Tracy how to play video poker. We won often enough to play for well over half and hour on $5, can't complain about that, even arcade video games would have cost more.

So, KÀ. OMZ it's great. I've never seen anything so amazing with my own two eyes. The "floating" platforms that make up the performance area are emense and the action and acrobatics are so saweeeeet. Our seats were very far back but we still had a great view and I enjoyed being able to catch all the action easily in view, since the performers work from the sides as well at times. The story was simple and easy to follow, and there were lots of funny moments to break up the stuntwork. Our seats had individual speakers in them and the surround sound effect worked quite well. I can't recommend the show enough, it's wetted our appitite for more Cirque acts. Ringling can bite me, this is the kind of circus everyone should go to.