what happens in vegas...

Vegas: yes it pretty much is what you see in the movies.

This is a town where its normal to drink on the street out of big ass yard glasses and have tiny mexican women flick business cards in your face in order to entice you to see "nudes nudes nudes", such wholesome family vibes.
But I shall be returning!

We stayed in the MGM Signature which was by far the most swanky hotel i've ever set foot in. Vegas does not disappoint, the toilet had a television. But then i would expect nothing less from America.

Of course we did the obligatory gambling, with the brother standing in the corner away from the table because he was only 17 at the time. He turned 18 while we were in New York. How harsh of us to take him to a country where the legal age is 21. good times.

 Our winnings! Mum turned out to be a roulette champion!

 The adorable lions in the MGM Grand.
They were non-plussed by the cowboy convention going on outside their home.

 Gondola rides inside the Ventian/Palazzo casinos.

Mum and I got very lost in these two casinos, they are very big and the inside

 looks like the outside, thats how they get ya! You could go insane in Vegas 

 Clearly loving life, one too many wines...

 Because one queen is never enough. 

This is old Las Vegas, its called Fremont Street and I can easily imagine 

Frank Sinatra and the rat pack struttin' their stuff down here.

And then we found these hilarious chairs. 

While in Vegas we took a trip over to see the fabled Grand Canyon and Hoover Dam.

We had opted for a fly over of the Grand Canyon in a tiny little plane, which delivered some amazing views but you can see the fear in the brother's eyes that it was a rather hair raising experience.

 On the day it was extremely turbulent and James is not the biggest fan of flying even in the best weather. We can all laugh about it now, well i was laughing at the time, but at one point he bit his lip so hard it started bleeding and I turned about to see him bleeding from what looked like his gums. It was intense. Now I call him Bloody Gums McGee.

But the views were amazing, its a pretty big hole in the ground!

                      

                   

 Hoover Dam

 Damn its big!

(pun intended)

 Fun Fact: Hoover Dam is not actually named after J. Edgar Hoover its a different Hoover. 

Who knew?

So there it is, Vegas
it really is something else.

so that went well..

Ahh how naive I was to think that I would be able to update this blog on all the crazy cool things I did while I was away in the states. 

In the past year quite a few of my friends went away o.s on exchange for uni or for amazeballs holidays, while I sat at home glued to facebook desperately awaiting some photo uploads of such adventures. 

When said "friends" did not allow me the pleasure of living vicariously through them by not uploading a single photo while they were away it is not enough to say i was majorly bummed. I vowed I would take a different approach when the fam and I went gallivanting across the U S of A, that I would not only feed my family and friends facebook stalking desires but would also keep le blog up to date with humorous stories and many a photo. 

That was then. This is now, almost two months since we returned and not a single word written. 

I discovered that it is in fact mission impossible to keep a blog up to date, while darting coast to coast and visiting eights cities and passing through practically all 52 states, and I am not Tom Cruise. 

So here and in a few posts that follow is a quick sum up of the places we visited in photomontage style with perhaps a tale of wit and or woe thrown in for good measure. 

Let us start at the very beginning, a very good place to start, in LA the city of angels.....

Hollywood Boulevard: yeah its pretty scummy, 

its hard to believe that the glamour of the oscars exists right in the middle of this filthy street

 Paramount Studios: Best studio tour ever. 

We totally went on the set of 'The Doctors'

 Johnny Rockets: We were repeat offenders here, 

having it in almost every city we visited!

 What's LA without a palm tree!?

This is one of my favourite photos I took over the course of the trip.

 Just shooting the new Ryan Gosling/ Sean Penn movie

 'Gangstar Squad' outside Grauman's Chinese
what of it?

Beverly Hills and Rodeo Drive, so very fancy

 Venice Beach: All glamour and rollerskates in the movies. 

All medicinal marijuana and homeless people in real life.
"The Doctor is in"

 Being awesome in the Hollywood Hills.

A cool little experiment with the brother's film camera 

He took some great shots on his vintage and fisheye film cameras

If hes kind enough I will share them with you!

So that was some Los Angeles highlights, its not a detailed image of what we got up to, 

because we just did soooooo much! To give you an idea of how much we crammed in, I took:

five thousand five hundred and thirty six

photos in 32 days.

What can I say? I loved it!