Farewell to the city of sin

Our last day in Vegas started with a wakeup call from Ellie, a Contiki companion visiting from Melbourne. We’d made a plan to drive the strip for a while before checking out the Stratosphere, which was a large tower with great views of the strip.

After jumping in the car we first headed down to the Vegas sign to take a couple of photos of the iconic symbol of Vegas.  We then all the way down the strip to the Stratosphere, where Ellie decided that she’d like to do the SkyJump, which is an in place free-fall down the side of the tower. 

We decided to stick around and watch this, but it then took 30 minutes for the people running the ride to sort it out and actually get Ellie onto the ride, so pretty much as soon as we hit the bottom we had to say goodbye. We’d planned to catch up with Sarah, another Contiki friend, back at Harrah’s, but with the delay at the Stratosphere we didn’t get back until 25 minutes late and we’d just missed her!

No longer having someone to hit the casinos with, we took Sarah’s advice and visited the Secret Garden at The Mirage. The Garden houses a dolphin enclosure as well as the lions and tigers used in the Siegfried & Roy show. These were both very cool, there was no show that day so we just watched the dolphins playing in their pools, and the cats were simply roaming in their enclosures. I did feel bad for the cats as the enclosures were quite small, and while it was great that these endangered animals are being protected it doesn’t seem to be much of a life.

After this we were ready to go, so loaded up the car and headed back down to the Stratosphere one last time. As we had free passes to the top of the tower we headed on up to get a final view of the strip. 

We headed out on the road back to LA, which this time took the expected 3.5 hours to get to Santa Monica. A quick dinner at the Ihop next door and it was off to bed to try and catch up on some sleep.