Vegas, baby!

Nick and I are currently in Las Vegas. Anchor decided to send him and a couple of others to an Epicor convention and there was really little reason I could find to not tag along. He's already up and gone for the day doing convention things, and I'm about to shower and start exploring until he is finished later this afternoon.
I had a long day of travel yesterday because we are poor and direct flights are expensive. I left Dallas at 2:18 pm and reached Salt Lake City just over two hours later. I waited around there long enough to go buy a drink and finish it before boarding a plane to LA. I was supposed to have a little over an hour in LAX, but my flight from Salt Lake was 35 minutes behind so basically I got off one plane, walked across the aisle to my next gate, and within 10 minutes boarded my next plane. Fortunately for me the lady who sat next to me from Salt Lake had brought some pizza on board because she was hungry and she offered me a couple of slices since there was no time to grab anything to eat before boarding to Vegas. My flight to Vegas had a noticeably different atmosphere - everyone was in party mode. It was kind of fun. It was a really short flight from LAX to Vegas, and I got my first glances of the strip as we circled around to land. By the way, landing in Vegas is scary. Apparently it's windy here, like, all the time, so our plane was doing some serious bobbling as we were approaching the runway.
I arrived here a couple of hours before Nick's flight was due, so I made my way to baggage and then my shuttle to the hotel. My shuttle driver attempted to get us from the airport in world record time and I'm pretty sure we took most turns on two wheels.  I was dropped off at Mandalay Bay, so I caught the tram over to the Luxor, which is where we are staying our first three nights. Walking into the Luxor is so cool - the huge sphinx out front is the first thing you see. The inside of the hotel is equally as cool - the rooms are all along the walls of the pyramid and the middle area is open and looks like a little city.

Our room is nice.  It's a premium deluxe, I think it what Kirk at the front desk said. We have a really cool view of Excalibur out our window as well.

 Off in the not-so-far distance, I have even a nice view of the mountains. It's partly cloudy today, and there's a slight chance of rain but it isn't very high.