Vegas Baby

After a few hectic weeks we had a family holiday to Las Vegas for just over a week and got back yesterday night (from 68F in Vegas to 12F in Minneapolis).

If you've never been to Vegas I'll mention some of the things that stood out to us as Nevada neophytes.

#1 - The Scale of the Hotels
When you look at a map of Vegas and see the hotels next to each other you think 'ooh, we'll just walk over to that hotel as its just a couple of hotels away' but the hotels are so huge that that could take 20 minutes. Here's an example, we stayed at the MGM Grand (top left of the image below) and it took us nearly half an hour to get to the aquarium in the Mandalay Bay (bottom left) which is the third hotel away (with nothing in between). The Grand has over 5,000 rooms and some hotels have over 6,000 and they all have massive complexes for gambling and restaurants, entertainment etc inside.
Our first night on the strip


In our hotel room
In the M&M store (where else but America could you get a 4 storey shop dedicated to M&Ms)The kids were well behaved at all times
And generally really excited by the whole experience.
More to come on this but I have to go and get ready for visitors tomorrow

Broom Hockey

Seeing as how I'm a complete slave driver at work and the team has been doing really well I decided to give people the afternoon off on a Friday so that we could do a fun team building event. Given that we can't spend any money on it in this economy (we can afford to but it would look bad) we decided to do Boot Hockey. It's basically ice hockey but you just wear normal boots with special strap on grips and its played with a tennis ball rather than a proper puck. As a lot of our team are from India and have never played any hockey before or even been on ice and it could be a little dangerous we decided to spice it up further by playing with a proper puck, no grips on the shoes, purely mitigated by a 'try not to injure yourself' dictate.



Honestly I don't think I have laughed so much over a couple of hours, ever. It was good to get out and just play in a really good natured way. We had to stop in the end as the ice was getting almost too slippery to stand up.

You can see that we were pretty strict about regulation head gear being worn at all times.
There was lots of this going on, I'm still amazed no-one got injured.


No hockey match would be complete without a fracas.
It was just as well we did it on a Friday as although no bones were broken a lot of unusual muscle groups got a right old work out and there were a lot of people who were pretty much crippled for the next couple of days from muscle stiffness and bruises - but luckily recovered for a ful day's work on Monday :-)

A few people also went sledging for the first ever time and had some great crashes.

Its like your Birthday and Christmas come at once

Martin and Margaret are here at the moment and we've kept the Christmas tree and lights up and on Friday we had a second Christmas - which pleased some people no end.
Then on Saturday we went for some more sledging and skating

Here is Martin coming down face first on the fast sledge, the closest you can get to the luge without a bobsleigh.
For the first time in over 30 days the temperature went above zero so there was really no need for coats and hats.
In the afternoon we had Dan's 6th birthday party and he just had a few friends over so that Dan could shout at them about not doing the right thing on Lego Star Wars on the Wii...

and play some games
get some Star Wars presents

And eat some Star Wars cake (are you noticing a theme?)
And dress up like princesses - no that's not right

And on Sunday Dan got to choose breakfast, so we made pancakes.
And finally, here's a picture from last week when I went to the Wild (hockey) and they won 6-1 again (like they did the only other time I went). You'll notice that they are playing a 12-0 formation which means all the players on the ice are having a big fight in one corner - I like hockey.