Trip to Los Angeles and Las Vegas

December 7-17, 2001
We flew from Tampa to Los Angeles, arriving late Friday night.
We stayed at the Wyndam Bel Age for two nights. It's a lovely, quiet place in W. Hollywood — small, but yet has a restaurant. Eric and Andy had dinner there on Friday night, so they were already there when we arrived.

We saw "Oceans Eleven" on Saturday, then dinner in my favorite place — PF Chang. We left Sunday late afternoon to fly to Vegas. Eric and Andy would be joining us the following Saturday, to spend the week end at the Venetian Hotel with us.
As we typically do on a trip, we spent a few days looking at homes. The picture to the right is the "standard" kitchen in the new spiffy high-rise apartments — called Turnberry Place — going up on the strip. Two of the four buildings are built. The picture above was taken at the fancy club on the property, called the Stirling Club. Our feeling was that this place was very formal, and certainly not our style.
We also looked at a new development South of Vegas, in Henderson. It is called Lake Las Vegas. It is a resort community, with the Hyatt Regency already there, and the Ritz Carlton Hotel and shops being built. It was started with a huge man-made lake that has 17 miles of shoreline. Lots of very expensive homes have already been built around the lake. The homes we looked at were town homes, sitting up high and looking down on the golf course (left), and other homes (right). The views of the mountains were beautiful, and when the community is finished it should be spectacular. After spending a week in pretty cold weather, and knowing that about four months of the winter hovers around 50, we were looking forward to being back in our milder climate.
When the boys arrived we all went to Wolfgang Puck's restaurant in an open area that also houses a gondola ride. The picture below was taken when Ken and I took that ride, last February.
I had not seen Eric with glasses, so I took a picture to remember "the look." Nice.
On Saturday afternoon we taxied up near MGM to see the movie that Andy has been working on for over a year now, called "Vanilla Sky." Ken and I decided that we'd have to see it again, that it was so complex that we'd probably missed some things.
We flew back on Monday, happy to be home, and enjoying our Christmas look.