Tenth Anniversary Trip

At Beatles Love (obviously)

My husband and I recently celebrated our tenth anniversary with a trip to Las Vegas.  Before you congratulate us, I should clarify that we haven’t actually met that 10-year milestone yet.  Our anniversary is in July, during the same week that our baby is due.  Since I would therefore not be able to travel on our real anniversary and would be highly likely to be in labor, which is not the most ideal of anniversary activities, we went ahead and celebrated early.  My parents kindly watched our kids for us. 

Bellagio Conservatory
This living mural was supposed to look like the impressionist
painting next to it.  I could sort of see it...not really.

Leaving Love.  It was crowded.

We traveled to Las Vegas for a family vacation last year and visited almost every kid-friendly attraction the city had to offer, so this time, we focused on more adult activities.  (By “adult” I mean activities that are not child-friendly such as the Bellagio Conservatory where children are not allowed;  I am not referring to the “adult entertainment” of which  Las Vegas has so many offerings.   We do happen to be a couple of goodie-two-shoes Mormons, after all. )

CSI: The Experience

We saw two Cirque shows: Love and Mystere.  For those unfamiliar with Cirque, it produces lavish dance/acrobatics shows with wild costumes and special effects.   I had seen Love before on a trip with my mom and sisters, but my husband hadn’t.  I loved Love, which is entirely based on Beatles music,  and was excited to see it again and introduce my husband to it.  Mystere was new to both of us.  I enjoyed Mystere very much, but not as much as Love.  Mystere is visually stimulating to watch, but it is also very abstract and has very little English text.  I like that the Beatles’ lyrics kindly narrate Love, helping me to better understand what I am seeing.  My husband, on the other hand, preferred Mystere over Love.  He felt that Mystere had more acrobatics while Love was more like a very advanced show choir performance, in his opinion.

We also went to a drive-in movie theater for a double feature, saw a magic show and visited two exhibits, CSI: The Experience and Bodies.  CSI is based on the TV show of the same name.  It was fun and educational;  it reminded me of the sort of exhibit you might find at the Epcot Center, the main difference of course, being that for just a wee bit more money, you see a lot more exhibits at the Epcot Center than just the one we saw at CSI. 

Bodies, however was absolutely amazing and well worth the price.  I had expected this to be a typically overpriced Las Vegas mini-exhibit, but it was fully comprehensive and large enough to be considered a museum rather than an exhibit.  If you ever did cadavers in college, it is nothing like that.  These bodies are posed as if alive so you can see what the inside of our bodies look like in motion.  They have also created a number of dissections for close-up views of different body systems.  As a person who has worked in tobacco prevention, I appreciated the exhibit comparing a healthy lung to a smoker's lung, and the huge vat placed next to it where people were invited to drop off their cigarettes as their first effort to quit smoking.  I didn't see another pretty lung like that in the whole exhibit.  I asked a guide about that, and she verified that only one of the donated bodies came from a non-smoker.  She had that person's other lung available to touch, and I could feel how soft it was in comparison to the rock-hard smoker's lung.   I also only saw one female body in the whole exhibit.  She was in the section on the reproductive system.  After I asked the guides about that, I heard about four or five other people approach them with the same question.  Apparently, everyone noticed the gender imbalance.  The guides confirmed that only one woman was there because fewer women donate their bodies to science.  I especially enjoyed the section on fetal development (from naturally deceased fetuses, the exhibit signs noted) and  seeing what my unborn child looks like now.  (Answer:  like a born child, but slightly smaller.)  However, my husband reminded me that the fetus on display had hair, while ours is likely bald, according to our pattern.