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Day 4: Friday 20th April I was so excited when I woke up because today I am going to fly. Today we were going to try indoor sky-diving! How works is like this: you are in a round room, and built into the floor is an enormous fan that creates winds of 120 m.p.h. You stand at the side of the room and hurl yourself into the updraft and then... you just hang there, in mid-air! Fantastic!!! I first saw this on the television in an article about how sky divers learn their complicated mid-air tricks, in an indoor simulator. When I found out there was one in Vegas (one of only five in the world) and it was open to the public, I knew I had to try it. Luckily the place was only 10 minutes walk from our hotel so we went to check it out. Ashley decided he didn't really fancy it, so Heather and I paid our $45 each and went up immediately for our training. This consisted of a brief chat and watching a short video, then we put on our suits and went to the wind chamber. We had the opportunity to watch a few people first, and then it was our turn. Actually staying up in the air is a lot harder than I thought it would be, you have to arch your back, point your toes and keep your head up, which is quite tricky considering how difficult it is even to breathe in winds that fast. I thought I did badly, but looking back at the video Ashley took I managed pretty well, hovering about 8 feet off of the floor. The instructors thought Heather was the best they had seen all day. I would really recommend this for anyone (like myself) who would like to experience sky-diving without throwing themselves out of a perfectly good plane. It is a very strange, intense feeling just floating in mid-air. 
After that we took a bus up the Strip to have a look at a hotel called the Venetian. A friend of Ashley's had recently been to Las Vegas and said that the Venetian was a good place to visit, and indeed it was. The hotel has a large shopping street inside it which has a canal running through the centre of it, where you can hire a gondola to go up and down the canal while the gondalier sings to you. The whole street is covered and the ceiling is painted sky blue with little wispy clouds, and the ambient lighting gives the impression of a perpetual dusk. After sampling the wares of the food court we crossed over the road to get the shuttle bus back to our hotel. We had the evenings entertainment all booked so we used the time to pack our things for the Big Day. Because we were to spend our wedding night at the Luxor while Ashley stayed at the Mardi Gras we arranged the suitcases so we only had to take a small one with us the next day, and since we were all flying out of Vegas together the day after we could leave everything in Ashley's room to collect when we came to pick him up. This done, we had a brief rest before setting out again. There were still a couple of free shows outside the hotels on the Strip that we wanted to see, the first of which was the pirate battle outside Treasure Island. This really was quite impressive, outside the hotel is a large strip of water with a pirate ship moored at one end, alongside their base. The show starts with the pirates celebrating another successful raid and storing their booty, and then a British warship "sails" around the corner and the pair of them start firing canons at each other causing huge explosions (we could feel the heat from 100 yards away), and falling rigging. This event was supposed to end with the British ship being holed below the waterline and sinking majestically beneath the waves as the captain bravely salutes and goes down with his ship. Except this time it didn't sink, so the confused captain bowed to a cheering audience and leapt ashore. 
A short walk further up the Strip was our next destination, to see the "volcano" outside the Mirage hotel. By day this is a very pleasant water feature, complete with waterfalls and fountains, but by night it becomes an explosive volcano (well, every 15 minutes it does). By the use of coloured lights and underwater gas jets the whole scene resembles a small erupting volcano, and very clever it looks too. After this it was time to catch a bus to the Luxor for the evening's main event, the Blue Man Group. You may recognise the Blue Man Group from the Intel pentium 4 adverts, and we chose this because all the reviews we had seen were very positive. The theatre was every bit as luxurious as the rest of the hotel, holding about 1,200 people so it was quite intimate. Because we had only bought the tickets two days earlier we were in the back row, which turned out to be the best view in the house, as we later found out. 
It's kind of hard to explain the show, it is billed as an evening of humour, science and music, and it certainly contains all three. It is extremely visual, and therefore hard to explain but, despite starting quite slowly, this turned out to be one of the most spectacular live events any of us had ever seen. And the music was superb as well, the Blue Men (for want of a better term) have unique percussive instruments made of plastic tubing so they create these wonderful tribal rhythms, with the help of a 7 piece backing band. The whole show became an assault on your senses, and built up to an incredible finalé. While the band played a K.L.F. song hundreds of day-glo streamers fell from the ceiling and started spinning around each other. Huge rolls of paper were un-rolled from the back and passed over the heads of the crowd to the front rows, and with all the visuals from the stage it created an awesome spectacle. If you ever have the chance of seeing the Blue Man Group then please go, you will love it. Dazed and amused we bade the hotel good night, until tomorrow, and went back to the Mardi Gras to get some rest before the Big Day. |
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