viva las vegas!

Surfin U. S. A. is more like it! We had the longest travel section of our tour this past week, from Arkensas to Oregon! 40 hours of travel over 3 days was absolutely brutal. The first day we traveled from Alma, AR to New Mexico through the Texas panhandle. We stopped in Amarillo (shout out to my favorite Webb's who are from there!) and I had a delicious steak at "The Big Texan."

Day two we moved on to Las Vegas, Nevada. Boy was that an adventure! I went with several of the boys to the Bellagio for dinner (at 9pm when we got there) to a magical all-you-can-eat gourmet buffet! Yes, it was expensive, but man was it worth it! I ate roast pork, tortellini in a walnut pesto sauce, soft pretzel rolls, pineapple fried rice, pizza, gourmet cheeses, cheesecake, fruit torts, and my favorite: the raspberry sorbet! It was probably about a billion calories, but don't worry, we certainly walked it off! I think we covered between 4 and 5 miles going up and down the strip, seeing all the beautiful hotels, all the lights, the giant fountain display, and New York, New York! Who knew home was so close by! I didn't gamble (I spent enough money on food, certainly worth the entertainment value of gambling), but we had a lot of fun exploring until 2am. It's certainly not somewhere I'd ever want to live, and it all started to look the same after only a few hours, but I'm glad we went and I had a great time.

Day three was Valentine's Day! We spent just about all of it on the bus, but everyone did "Clueless Cupid," a Valentine's version of Secret Santa. I of course, drew Carl's name (if you don't know who he is, read previous posts). With a $10 limit, I could only do so much, but I ended up getting him a manicure multi-tool (as he is known to the entire cast as the "tool") inside a spider-man lunch box. If you read last week's post, you know how perfect that gift is. He absolutely loved it, and has since started using the lunch pail to put his knitting projects in. Yes he started knitting. Carl the tool. When we finally got off the bus, Stracko, Angelica and I went to the diner by the hotel and had a lovely ladies dinner and milkshakes to celebrate our survival of the longest bus trip ever.

The next day we traveled to Medford, Oregon for our first show in days, which was a little rusty at that point. Medford is absolutely beautiful, and a place I would consider moving to when I'm ancient with a million grandkids. We had dinner in a train-depot-turned-restaurant/bar, full of character, DELICIOUS food, and ridiculously low prices. All in all a successful journey to the west coast!

Tomorrow morning we're headed to a 5 show weekend in Reno, Nevada. Our first sit-down (three whole days in the same city!) since Newport News, VA a month ago. I'm scheduled for some serious understudy rehearsals during our downtime, so that should be a ton of fun!

Cheerio all, I'm off to bed to get some rest before heading out on the road again...