Saturday 27th March 2010

[08:34 GMT]

A good start to the day. For once the weather was kind to us. We normally have rain on our drive down to Gatwick, this time it was sunny all the way!

We arrived before the meet and greet guy, which is a first. I was worried he wouldn't be able to start our car (as it requires a button start) but he did something neither Linda or I had managed, he got it started first time.

Check-in was last night, so the bag drop was all we had to do. Lines were about normal, but we used our silver flying club card (for the first time) to get our bags dropped quicker ;)

On through security, which was possibly the fastest ever as there was no queue at all - a first for us for sure.

We STILL have to complete those damn green forms - it's got to be a couple of years now since the on-line version of those forms was announced, but here they are, sitting next to me waiting for the slightest mistake to send me to the back of the arrivals queue :(

As is normal with these things, Linda grabbed the coffees, I set up the laptop and now I'm sitting on my lonesome, talking to you lot whilst Linda is cruising the duty-free. She only paused to update her Facebook status - how times have changed :)

Flight has not been assigned a gate yet, we have a couple of hours yet..

[17:05 PDT]

Our flight was completely full as far as we could tell. Ladybird took off at 11:35 (15 minutes late) and touched down at 16:25 local time (8 hours behind UK time). The flight itself was pretty good as long flights go - we didn't get any turbulence as we were flying along (even over Iceland). The flight, as I said before, was choc-a-block, but we were in the little bit of the economy area that was in front of the wing, so we were separated a little form the main bulk of the passengers. On arrival (20 minutes ahead of schedule!) we were one of the first off as we were so close to the exit. All our papers were in order, so it was straight through immigration without a hitch (last time here, we were sent to the back of the line when we missed a bit at the bottom of the green visa document).A little wait for the cases, but they all arrived safely. Straight out to a cab in the glorious sunshine :)Temperature is, I guess, in the high teens, maybe low 20s, but it's all sun, sun, sun!! (I hear it's been raining at home, snigger!)

We've ended up with a room on the 34th Floor of tower 1, so there's less walking required to get to the main MGM Casino (last time we were in tower 3). Looking out onto the Strip, one thing that is definitely different is the lack of cranes in our view!

This is what it looked like back in March 2008.

And this is what it's like now

The blue building in the centre-right of the photo was still only a few floors high back in 2008.

Now we're settled in the hotel room, we're going to go out for a wander around. We've been in touch with the guys running the Grand Canyon Tour tomorrow as we needed to tell them what tower we are in. Hopefully, we'll get a pick-up as planned.

Even though it's nearly ten to one in the morning UK time, I'm feeling a little hungry. Time for something to eat I guess.

[04:28 PDT+1]

Wandered about a bit in the MGM Grand, outside it was a pleasant temperature. Quite busy for a Saturday evening of course. We found some slots and I ended up about $50 down. Linda was about $30 down. Still... it's early days!